SmoothMouse

Improves OS X mouse/trackpad usability

2 followers

Improves OS X mouse/trackpad usability

2 followers

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Launch tags:Mac•Productivity•User Experience

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Raycast

Hunter

I've used this experimental project for some time and heard that it might be getting revived soon. It essentially addresses pointer lag in OS X. The reasons for the lag are pretty technical, but this is one solution aimed at addressing it.

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12yr ago

Strikingly

@chrismessina Interesting. It's a relatively and almost undetectable lag right. We are talking a few milliseconds? I'll give it a spin.

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12yr ago

Raycast

Hunter

@irvingtorresyc it's more detectable in different circumstances, like gaming. From the original blog post:

The main problem of mouse movement in Mac OS X is not acceleration — it’s lag.

By that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.

I mentioned acceleration because a lot of people often confuse it with lag. The truth is, in Mac OS X you can change acceleration to whatever you want using many programs and techniques. In ControllerMate, for instance, you can manually draw your own acceleration curve.

But it’s all pretty much useless as long as mouse movement is literally retarded, because it takes a lot of time for your brain to get used to it.

The problem I’m talking about affects all mouse and touchpads since at least Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. It still exists in Snow Leopard and Lion.

The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. You can supposedly avoid the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme.

The problem is as well closely related to the cursor jumping issue that has alone been fixed in Lion thanks to all our bug reports.

The problem has been confirmed by an Apple engineer. I’ve also heard that they are supposedly working on a solution. The timeframe is unknown though.

Report

12yr ago

PageSpeed Ninja

Explanation of the product would help on the site

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12yr ago

@ugurkaner Indeed. Hard to show via video obviously, but a .webm illustration etc might go a long way to helping.

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12yr ago

Free Logos by Larkef

A must-have app if you like playing games on your Mac.

Report

12yr ago

Reviews

Raycast

Hunter

Report

12yr ago

Strikingly

@chrismessina Interesting. It's a relatively and almost undetectable lag right. We are talking a few milliseconds? I'll give it a spin.

Report

12yr ago

Raycast

Hunter

@irvingtorresyc it's more detectable in different circumstances, like gaming. From the original blog post:

The main problem of mouse movement in Mac OS X is not acceleration — it’s lag.

By that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.

I mentioned acceleration because a lot of people often confuse it with lag. The truth is, in Mac OS X you can change acceleration to whatever you want using many programs and techniques. In ControllerMate, for instance, you can manually draw your own acceleration curve.

But it’s all pretty much useless as long as mouse movement is literally retarded, because it takes a lot of time for your brain to get used to it.

The problem I’m talking about affects all mouse and touchpads since at least Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. It still exists in Snow Leopard and Lion.

The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. You can supposedly avoid the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme.

The problem is as well closely related to the cursor jumping issue that has alone been fixed in Lion thanks to all our bug reports.

The problem has been confirmed by an Apple engineer. I’ve also heard that they are supposedly working on a solution. The timeframe is unknown though.

Report

12yr ago

PageSpeed Ninja

Explanation of the product would help on the site

Report

12yr ago

@ugurkaner Indeed. Hard to show via video obviously, but a .webm illustration etc might go a long way to helping.

Report

12yr ago

Free Logos by Larkef

A must-have app if you like playing games on your Mac.

Report

12yr ago