> I wondered if anyone else had experienced similar issues? What you're seeing is your app's actual framerate. Nothing is going slower. Here's why...
If you don't specify any custom cursors, Flash just uses the OS's cursor and let's the OS do its standard thing of drawing it (which all modern OS's do as a very high priority process, usually part of the video driver, so that the mouse is always responsive). When you specify a custom cursor, the Flash Player actually does something tricky (some may say hacky!). It hides the OS cursor (when the mouse is over the Flash Player) and instead moves a DisplayObject around the stage tracking the mouse's position. So, with the default cursor you're using the OS to draw the cursor; with any custom cursors, you're using the Flash Player API to draw it. The most obvious effect (if you're app is not performance intensive) is that the mouse will only update at your app's framerate, which for Flex defaults to 24fps (much lower than any modern OS's mouse refresh). Personally, I think Adobe should provide a cursor API that's implemented as a native OS cursor (provide a bitmap of a fixed resolution, for example). At a minimum, I think the Flash Player should expose a collection of native cursors that map to the browser's native cursors. It's rather irritating that I have to track down and embed a hand-grab image, a resize image, etc., in order to have what are virtually universal cursors under any OS (and mine won't match the OS!). This is one area where AJAX apps are superior. Troy.
