I'm always a bit surprised when I'm building a Flex app and remember that there are no common cursors provided... considering that the web browser provides common cursors (which those AJAX people get to use for their RIAs!) and the OS provides common cursors (which those desktop people get to use for their RIAs!), I'd think Flash could provide some native cursor functionality.
So, I'm looking to solve that problem and am curious what's worked for folks... - I'd love to see Adobe provide a native, common cursors API in a future Flash Player. Doing cursors within the Flash engine is great from a flexibility perspective, but its pretty obvious (in many apps) when the cursor "disappears" over the Flash content and becomes an in-Flash cursor (affected by the app's framerate, etc.). The big advantage of native cursors is that they are silky smooth and the user is guaranteed to be familiar with them (since their the OS's common cursors). - In lieu of Adobe providing a native cursor API, there's obviously the DisplayList-based cursor API. For that API, I'm curious if anyone has a good source of common cursor SWF/GIF/PNGs? Sure, I could go grab some from the web somewhere, but I figured there was an "official" set of images somewhere that's used by open-source products like Firefox or used by the Linux crowd... googling "cursors" is fairly frustrating with all the MySpace-nausea animated GIFs out there. - I did have a crazy idea of how to get native cursors in Flash, and I'm curious if anyone has tried this or could suggest its viability before I start doing the grunt work. If I set the "cursors" CSS style for my Flash embed (the object/embed element in the HTML), is the Flash Player going to respect that or override it with its own cursor management? If it respects it, a possibility would be to call from Flash to JavaScript and ask it to change the cursor on the embed, thus getting my native (or at least browser-native, which virtually always maps to the OS native) cursors... Any ideas, suggestions, tips, links... all appreciated and welcomed! Troy.
