I used Kindwords to make my first compilation disks until I discovered Diskmaster 1.3 and then later on Diskmaster 1.3 and shell commands.
This is a nice pointer collection, I used to enjoy putting in compilation disks and seeing the 4 system colours and the 4 mouse sprite colours. I also remember the compilation disks that used “rainbow” or “stripes” which changed the background or text colour on each scanline.
Bonus points for the kiwi pointer (personal NZ bias).Anyone still using an Amiga should try EgoMouse; it makes your mouse pointer rotate to face to the direction of movement; yes, this makes it ridiculously difficult to "drive", but it's fun
Applications could define their own as needed, of course (the pointer was just a hardware sprite).
While editing the mouse pointer of a modern-day OS is pretty much inaccessible, the "cursor" CSS feature in the major browsers immediately felt low threshold, accessible and fun again. Changing the "real" mouse pointer via CSS! Only on a website, but cool nonetheless!
That little fun feature alone helped getting this project off the ground. I tried to make my adaption of the pointer editor low threshold, too! :)
I wish I had the disk, that we got it from... just a single 3.5" Floppy labeled "Romeo" and we all knew what it was.
https://heckmeck.de/pointers/?user-content=00000000000000000...
I've also scanned all "tiny" cursors with 13 pixels or less. Surprisingly, there is no pointer with this exact shape yet!
There's one on there the matches that shape, but without the transparent centre pixel. Crosshairs, row 2, 4th from left
They can certainly be overdone or done poorly, but done well they give a really nice indicator that can account for some combination of context of what's under the pointer to be operated on, any modifiers active, and any ambient state.
We had some great designs back then. And some eye sores too.
Can we bring back the ability to skin our windows again? Customize the look and feel of our OS to our liking or am I just going to get the obligatory “Switch to Linux”?
You could try FreeBSD 15!
