Finder Cursor Doesn't Change Sometimes

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Level 2

490 points

Finder Cursor Doesn't Change Sometimes

Have you noticed this? You move the cursor around a document such as your web browser, Preview with a pdf file etc. Notice the cursor will change shape as it goes over different parts of the document. It may change from an arrow to a finger or to the text bar. Quite often my cursor gets stuck in the text bar until I click in the window to get back the arrow. While its a text bar I can still click on items and then afterwards the cursor shape changes according to what it's over. I saw this in 10.3 and now it's in 10.4. Maybe something that came over in 10.3 during my archive and install. It's kind of annoying.

I can almost reproduce every time in Preview. Open a PDF and open the drawer and enter something in the search field. The cursor will change to a text bar. Enter some text and after the search results display move the cursor down. Often the cursor will not change from a bar to an arrow.

This happens a lot in Firefox. The finder seems to loose track of cursor boundaries.

Thanks for any advice

Kelvin

iBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 1.25m, 60gig, Superdrive

Posted on Feb 9, 2007 8:06 PM

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Answer 1

macjack

Level 10

111,292 points

Feb 10, 2007 2:03 PM in response to KRitchie

Hi Kelvin,

That's a good question. I often wondered about that myself. You got me to do a little digging and it may be an issue with the Cursor Rectangles as outlined in this ADC topic. I'm posting this link as reference only, do not try this at home 😉

I cannot reproduce your cursor behavior in Preview on my Intel Mac, or on my G4. But I do see the behavior often in Firefox. Perhaps trashing your Preview prefs would help:
~(Home)/Library/com.apple.Preview.plist and com.apple.Preview.bookmarks.plist
(Drag the bookmarks to the desktop if you use them, instead of trashing)

Also might try clearing cache on Firefox. I've done that and tested and it seems to be gone for now.

I'm there is someone who knows more, so stay tuned.

-mj
macjack@gmail.com

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Answer 2

Mar 14, 2007 4:22 AM in response to KRitchie

I have the same problem - mostly with iMail. The cursor will sometimes display as a text bar when it should be an arrow head. I wondered whether be happening when running low on system memory, but even iwhen I quit other open applications it wil still do this. This iMac is less than a month old and is not loaded with junk. It's happened since it came out of the box. Disappointing...

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