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Today’s Question: While giving a presentation the other night, you turned your mouse pointer into a spotlight to highlight what you were doing in Lightroom and Photoshop. What application are you using to change your curser into a spotlight?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I use an app called “Mouseposé”, which is a Macintosh application that enables you to highlight the mouse position. Windows users can simply enable the option to “Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key” found on the Pointer Options tab of the Mouse Properties dialog.
More Detail: The built-in option for Windows users creates an animation of red circles to show the mouse pointer position whenever you press the Ctrl key. This is a handy option that you can enable when you will be presenting to others and then disable when you’re not presenting.
For Macintosh users I highly recommend the Mouseposé application, which is what I use. This app is available in the Apple App Store. With the Mouseposé application running you can use a keyboard shortcut to enable or disable the display. When the display is enabled, your entire screen will be darkened except for a circular area around the current position of your mouse pointer.
The effect is to shine a “spotlight” on your current mouse position, with that spotlight effect following your mouse as you move it around on the screen. I find this can be tremendously helpful for users to see exactly where you’re working within an interface when demonstrating a technique to them with a projected display.