If you know me personally, then you probably know that I am going blind thanks to a rare genetic eye disease.  My eye disease has already been a huge detriment to my eyesight.  One of the big things to suffer is my ability to see small things moving fast right in front of me.  On a multi-monitor setup, this makes finding the cursor absolute hell.

The Problem

I’ll keep this short, as I’ve basically already told you what the problem is.  On my three monitor development computer, I am constantly losing the mouse during the day.  I had used the Microsoft accessibility mousefinder (press CTRL, and it pings around the mouse).  The problem with this is, there is only an effect around 50-100 PX around the mouse, and it is a very light gray, almost unnoticeable.. For someone like me, if I am not looking at the monitor when I click the CTRL button, I have to click it multiple times and dart my eyes back and forth in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the action…  I had tried other cursor finders, but none I liked…

The Solution

So what’s a guy to do when he doesn’t like his options?  MAKE A NEW OPTION…  What else should we as developers do, am I right?  So, I went ahead and made a mousefinder of my own, with 6 separate settings to change the effect.  I am releasing it here for anyone else that may also have problems finding their mouse at times.

Some of its features include:

• Multiple options to change to achieve the exact effect you want.
• If your mouse moves while it is honing in, it will hone in on its current position.
• Many times, I would press the button and move my mouse at the same time, and many times, the mouse happened to be at a screen edge, so I would miss it. This program will restart its animation on a new screen if the mouse changes its screen while playing.
• Tested on Windows 7 x64
• Stylish color changing from green to red.
• Deployed as a ClickOnce, so easy to remove if you don't like it.
• Press Right CTRL to trigger effect
• Application lives in notification area so that you can easily reach configuration or close it.
• To get it to run on startup, copy its application shortcut from its startmenu directory to the “Startup” folder in your startmenu.

Conclusion

I understand if you don’t download this…  You don’t know me and I don’t know you.  I can only say that I have honestly NOT added any virus’ or malware to the package.

Finally, if you do use this application - please leave a comment, or email me and tell me what you think of it. Encounter a bug or hashes no longer match? I want to know that too!

<warning type=”BadPun”>Now, stop messing around and start mousing around!</warning>