Mouse cursor disappears.

I waited two weeks before post something, now I can say that the problem after upgrading to mavericks was solved.

I painted and tested with big large brushes, and go over the interface of photoshop many times and the cursor didn't dissapears!

🙂

I'm very happy about this, finally my workflow returned to be efficient!

As always I use two monitors configuration.

thank you.

😉

islandphotographerand Luigi.T:

Having reverted to M. Lion, and after the problem of Firewire external drives not sleeping has been fixed, (whenever that might be) I will do another installation of Mavericks. But from what I saw of it during three days of usage, I didn't see much different from M. Lion that tempted me. Perhaps I will stick with M. Lion.

I have had intermittent disappearances of my mouse cursor as well on my iMac from when it ran Lion to Mt. Lion for years.

I too have tried everything.

It has happened frequently when using Adobe applications.

I have recently had to set my display size to 'the best for the built in display', instead of scaling it to a lower resolution, to accommodate major unresolved issues with several 'Blizzard' games I play. This has made everything from the cursor to the system text very small and hard to see.

Using System Preferences ->Display -> Cursor Size, I enlarged my cursor.

The mouse now disappears constantly when moving over pages in Safari, and between any app.

You can see that it is functional, as hot spots will change when hovered over.

The only way to get the cursor back is for me to move the cursor to where I believe the desktop is, then click, and it re-appears. If I hover it over the current home page at Apple.com, it will disapear after it has activated a hot spot, and reappear as the defulat 'hand' when moved over an image hot spot.

When I reset the size to the smallest, at least Safari works again, until I start switching between apps.

Having just read that installing Mavericks has resolved the mouse issue for one reader, I decided to reply.

I have had intermittent disappearances of my mouse cursor as well on my iMac from when it ran Lion to Mt. Lion for years.

Upgrading to Mt. Lion didn't fix the problem, but did cause a lot of issues with my Adobe applications at the time, forcing me to upgrade them from CS5 to CS6 due to numerous incompatibility issues.

Upgrading to Mavericks is not an option I want to try despite the thousands of one and two word reviews on the App Store such as 'Great!', or "Best OSX Ever!", for two reasons:

1: A recent attempt to just synch my iPad running IOS6, either with the 'Cloud' or with my iMac failed. Despite contacting Apple Support, and several hours of work, the results were a forced upgrade to IOS7 on the iPad and a total loss of it's data, despite backups still residing on my iMac, and a backup that was on the 'Cloud' just before the forced OS update. The techs told me they have no record of a backup to the 'Cloud'. Not good.

2: After seeing the IOS7 features, I don't like the cosmetic changes, nor will I have a use for many of the 'improvements'.

But I digress.

The mouse cursor still, and always has disappeared since I've owned my iMac.

I too have tried everything.

It has happened frequently when using Adobe applications, which I update constantly.

I have recently had to set my display size to 'the best for the built in display', instead of scaling it to a lower resolution, to accommodate major unresolved issues with several 'Blizzard' games I play. This has made everything from the cursor to the system text very small and hard to see.

Using System Preferences ->Display -> Cursor Size, I enlarged my cursor. Unfortunately there is no way to enlarge system text without messing with things you shouldn't have to.

The mouse now disappears constantly when moving over pages in Safari and between any app.

You can see that it is functional, as hot spots will change when hovered over.

The only way to get the cursor back is for me to move the cursor to where I believe the desktop is, then click, and it re-appears. If I hover it over the current home page at Apple.com, it will disappear after it has activated a hot spot, and reappear as the default 'hand' when moved over an image hot spot.

When I reset the size to the smallest, at least Safari works again, until I start switching between apps.

Life goes on and we now have colored iPhones available that will be obsolete and in land fills within two years. Woohoo!

Too late now, but try Phoneview for making independent backups of your iPad or iPhone (not relying on iCloud).

http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

Also Calendar and Address Book have their own archiving functions (e.g. File/Export/Calendar Archive)

Back on topic - the cursor problem...

If you use a trackpad, for a quick way to make the cursor reappear try the three finger swipe left then right (to switch between Spaces and back). I haven't had the vanishing cursor problem for months but used to use this technique. (BTW - has anyone tried changing some of the settings in Mission Control to see if this affects the cursor problem?)

Firefox seemed to have less problems than Safari. Some of us wondered if it was related to Adobe Flash/Shockwave but I don't think that was ever resolved.

Mavericks is actually better than Lion and Mountain Lion and, in my view, is worth trying as it could fix your cursor problem. Cosmetically it looks the same and all my iCloud services have been working well. I have listed some minor problems here:

http://users.tpg.com.au/aoaug/mac_osx.html#mavericks

I just had this issue on my brand new MBP Retina 15 (with Maverick obviously).

The problem seems to be a conflict with my USB hub. If I unplug the hub, an otherwise wonderful Anker uspeed usb3, all goes back to normal. When I plug it back in, the cursor start disappearing in certain apps like Chrome.

G

My disappearing mouse cursor issue has finally appear to have resolved itself. I thought it may be as a result of Mavericks, but I got to thinking that it may actually be from something else. My hard drive recently died and instead of restoring from a backup I ended up reinstalling the OS and restoring a partial backup.

Interestingly enough with my new hard drive/install I haven't installed Xcode. I always assumed there was a problem with Adobe, Flash or Java but so far with Mavericks everyhting has been cool. The only thing I can think that is different is the lack of Xcode.

I have Xcode (and do have the mouse problem).

I have read that Xcode is used for developing software for the Mac. I don't have any use for it so I would like to uninstall it.

http://macdevelopertips.com/xcode/how-to-uninstall-xcode.html

advises running the following in Terminal

sudo <Xcode>/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

but I get "no such file".

How can I uninstall Xcode?

Oh well I thought it was worth investigating. I don't know why my disappearing mouse cursor problem seems to have resolved itself, but I know it was a big pain in the rear and I was hoping the Xcode thing was the key.

My disappearing mouse issue has resolved itself after installing Mavericks. I had xcode previously, no Adobe products except for flash.

So nice to be back to normal! No more annoying problems!

Only weird thing I have now is that one of my backup drives defaulted to generic USB drive icon instead of Time Machien green icon. Annoying, stupid, but I don't care.

Still very shameful of Apple not to have done anything about this cursor problem for many months, not even an acknowledgement.

Dear SmokeMonster,

i have the same problem as discussed before - my white macbook is connected to an external display (Samsung LCD), and when I close the lid, I "lose" the big screen as well. maybe it is just some kind of system preference setting - it used to work all right for the past half six months, then since I connected a wireless mouse about two days ago, it is giving me problems. Do you have any good tips? Thanks! MacMester.

Ever since I installed Maverics I've had problems. Apple had me reinstall it a second time and that helped with a few things (like improper syncing to the cloud, which I also hate,) but my cursor stilll does the random disappearing act. I also get screen freeze. I am sorry I ever updated to Maverics. I own 6 other Macs and thankfully all are still on Snow Leopard. When I have to get things done, I have the older machines to save the day. Maverics is like working with an old version of Windows-works great if you don't mind rebooting a few times/day.

While my problem seems to have been resolved and I'm quite happy about that. One commentor theorized that installing Adobe products potentiall overwrote or replaced a system file which ultimately caused the problem.

I thought about this a bit more and just thought I'd mention that Adobe products, Flash as well as others happen to be one of the very few programs that require me to enter an adminstrator password to install. This always causes me to hesitate before just blindly entering my password. The fact that Adobe stuff needs admin access to install updates seems suspect to me.

I'd love it if somebody more technical than me could monitor their system when doing a Flash upgrade and examine exactly why Adobe needs admin access and what they are doing once they get it. It's just one of those things that gives me an uneasy feeling and the fact that nobody else requires it causes that uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Augapfel wrote:

While my problem seems to have been resolved and I'm quite happy about that. One commentor theorized that installing Adobe products potentiall overwrote or replaced a system file which ultimately caused the problem.

I thought about this a bit more and just thought I'd mention that Adobe products, Flash as well as others happen to be one of the very few programs that require me to enter an adminstrator password to install. This always causes me to hesitate before just blindly entering my password. The fact that Adobe stuff needs admin access to install updates seems suspect to me.

I'd love it if somebody more technical than me could monitor their system when doing a Flash upgrade and examine exactly why Adobe needs admin access and what they are doing once they get it. It's just one of those things that gives me an uneasy feeling and the fact that nobody else requires it causes that uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Good idea! I would like to know that as well.

How long has this been going on for. I'm so used to it at this stage I hardly notice it anymore.

Another example of Apple's apathy towards the problems of it's customer.

I don't care if its a problem with Apple / Adobe or both. Get it fixed.