Cursor library update and cleanup

Published by Vlasta about 4 hours ago.

The cursor library has received a larger update affecting multiple parts of the site. Some of the changes are visible immediately, others are more technical and mostly happen behind the scenes. Because the page styles and preview images were updated, it is recommended to press CTRL+F5 before reporting any problems with the new pages.

A large part of the update was focused on cleaning up cursor files and improving internal handling of the library. Cursors now have hashes assigned to them to help identify duplicates. Duplicate uploads are still allowed, but this should reduce unnecessary storage use over time.

All existing cursors in the database were processed and inspected. Their sizes were recorded and empty images were removed. It was surprisingly common for inexperienced authors to create cursors with multiple sizes, but only actually draw one of them. This could make the cursor effectively unusable for people with a different cursor size configured in Windows, resulting in the dreaded "invisible cursor" experience.

Completely transparent cursors were also removed from the library entirely (unless they were part of a set). There were thousands of them. From now on, it will no longer be possible to upload completely empty cursors, and if you upload a cursor containing some empty sizes, those sizes will be stripped automatically during upload.

Another improvement is better previews for inverting cursors. PNG-compressed cursors are currently excluded from this preview mode, though support for those may come later.

The most visible change is the redesign of individual cursor pages. They now use a layout similar to individual icon pages. Download buttons use the newer style, and author icons with portfolio or donation links are displayed in the header.

There is also a new preview showing the actual sizes stored in the cursor file, instead of being limited to only 32, 48, and 64 pixels.

Cursor authors will notice a new Edit hotspot button. This button is currently only visible to the author of the cursor, though I may allow broader use later under certain conditions. It can be used to fix hotspot positions by dragging the cursor image over a crosshair. There are currently some visibility issues with the crosshair in certain browsers, if you cannot see it properly, zooming in usually helps (if you are interested why this it, it is surprisingly difficult to have a single-pixel dashed line in a world, where page zoom affects everything). Considering how many cursors with incorrect hotspots appeared recently, this tool became necessary.

Individual sizes can now also be removed from uploaded cursors. This should not be needed very often anymore because empty sizes are removed automatically, but the option is still there. The last remaining size cannot be removed, because that would make the cursor invalid.

Other changes include a live preview area showing how the cursor behaves in practice, and an updated method for using cursors on your own website.

There is also a new and more natural way to modify cursor attributes such as role, license, name, or description. Look for the Modify button above the page header (it only appears when hovering over the area). Clicking it switches the page into edit mode (name can be edited directly in the header). The same system is now used on individual icon pages as well.

Because these changes affect many parts of the cursor handling system, there may still be bugs or inconsistencies. Please report any problems you find. ...and hopefully I did not accidentally delete or damage any actually useful cursors during the cleanup. Before reporting display issues, make sure you refreshed the page with CTRL+F5, because both the CSS and many preview images changed.

Tweet Share Vlasta's blog RSS feed Subscribe