Mouse Shadow?

S

senne

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I have an iMac 700Mhz G3 (special edition) and i don't have the shadow of my mouse.. I have Mac OS 10.2.1. Does anybody know how to "activate" the shadow somehow?



senne.
 
I though it had to do if QE was enabled. I have it at home with my PowerBook 667 but not at work with a G4 450.

Twister
 
Yes, i don't have QE... But does a mouse-shadow uses a lot of the CPU? Or doesn't have it to do anything with that?



senne.
 
Mouse shadow? are we talking about the 3 pixel grey "shadow" around the curser that i can barely see, or am i missing something?

i'm so confused! :confused:
 
Originally posted by unlearnthetruth
Mouse shadow? are we talking about the 3 pixel grey "shadow" around the curser that i can barely see, or am i missing something?

i'm so confused! :confused:
Click to expand...

Yes :D

I love it! But i don't have it... pff



senne.
 
The mouse shadow has nothing to do with QE. I have two Macs without QE that both have the mouse shadow. I have two other Macs with QE and they also both have the mouse shadow.
 
I don't have the shadow. running on a B&W G3 with stock rage 128.

I was under the impression that it was a QE enabled trait.
 
I was also under the impression that its a QE enabled "feature".

I would think it would be slow on non QE systems because it removes the cursor drawing from the graphics card (where it normally lives) becuase Quartz has to calculate all the transarancy for the shadow for every move of the mouse. With QE, this is still done in the graphics card.

What non-QE macs have the shadow anyway? It would be interesting to find out the specs of them.
 
I've got the mouse shadow. I DON'T have Quartz Extreme... specs on my system are in the sig. I don't notice any kind of slowing down because of the shadow. Tried to take a snapshot, both with Shift-Command-3 and with Grab, but the mouse pointer doesn't show up at all with Shift-Command-3 and Grab takes the shadow off the pointer... ah well, you're just gonna have to trust me on this one... :D
 
With such a visible feature you'd think that this would be documented somewhere. I'm going to find out what it is!
 
This is all I've found so far...

Taken from http://www.macbuyersguide.com/software/system/MacOSX10-2.htm
The "beach ball" busy system indicator has an "aquafied" appearance, and the mouse pointer has a drop shadow, at least on systems supporting "Quartz Extreme" OpenGL acceleration of user interface elements.
Click to expand...

http://www.swssoftware.com/other/jaguar/jaguar1.html
The mouse cursor does not have the drop-shadow that has been touted on other websites. I do not yet know if this is because it might rely on Quartz Extreme (which is not supported on the Pismo PowerBooks) or if it didn’t make the cut for the final release of Jaguar, or if there is some other reason. I will investigate this further.
Click to expand...
Later he said
[PowerBook G3] I think I may have confirmed that the shadow does not appear on the mouse cursor because the Pismo does not support Quartz Extreme.
Click to expand...
 
Well, I can assure you that they're mistaken in assuming that the cursor drop-shadow is a Quartz Extreme indicator. My mouse pointer has the shadow on both the monitor connected to a PCI Radeon 7000 (32MB) card AND the monitor connected to the stock PCI Rage 128 (16MB) card.

I have not found one definitive answer to the cursor drop-shadow phenomenon. I do not think... in fact I am almost positive... that it indicated Quartz Extreme, simply because Quartz Extreme is NOT enabled on my system, and I verified this with the "QuartzExtremeChecker" software available on versiontracker.com.

Perhaps it is an indication that you have a graphics card with 32MB of RAM, therefore, you have the "recommended" setup for Quartz Extreme, regardless of whether your card is PCI or AGP or whether or not Quartz Extreme is actually enabled.
 
That's kinda what I was wondering about as well... either a specified amount of VRAM or a specific system speed.
 
Maybe it has to do with how much memory your computer has or if it was a clean install.

Who knows.

Twister
 
Howabout processor type? I've got a G4 -- it's got the shadow. I've heard of people with iBooks (G3) that DON'T have the shadow...

Anyone with a G3 that's got the shadow or a G4 that doesn't?

Edit: Nevermind. I just re-read this thread and found that Twister has a G4 that doesn't have the shadow... I'm curious -- is it a stock G4/450 machine or some older machine that's been upgraded?
 
when i put my cursor on top of some colors i can't see the shadow at all, but on top of other (lighter) colors, i can see it. maybe everyone has it, just not everyone sees it.
 
Well we have two G4's at work. A 400 and 450 i believe. They are the standard Grey and White Towers. Nothing special. No upgrade cards or anything like that.

Twister
 
Originally posted by boi
when i put my cursor on top of some colors i can't see the shadow at all, but on top of other (lighter) colors, i can see it. maybe everyone has it, just not everyone sees it.
Click to expand...

I thought about that too until I saw what the shadow looked like. I'm now sure that I don't have the cursor shadow. When I hold my mouse over a black background there is no shadow at all... just a hard line where my cursor ends
 
I have a G4 450 DP with an AGP Rage 128 Pro 16MB and no QE and no mouse shadow.:( I was uder the impression that all AGP cards would use QE but I must have been mistaken because it is not enabled.
 
It seems that the only system spec that determines whether you have the shadow or not seems to be vram. and 32meg seems to be the magic number
 
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