Green snowflake trails quite helpful

I wanted to make an opaque title. Did I succeed? Yet it also describes what I want to talk about.

If you're on a Mac and using a very large screen (mine is 27 inches, and there are even bigger Mac screens) you may have experienced a problem with seeing the cursor. I sure did. I could see it at times but the damn thing was so small! It's from having a high resolution screen. In effect, the cursor disappeared all the time. I was forever moving my mouse to see if I could find it. This is especially pronounced when in a writing program like Scrivener or Word. Those I-beam cursors are gone on a big screen.

So I went to the Mac App Store, typed in cursor and voila! For $1.99 I got a program called Pinpoint. It lets you change your cursor all you want. I opted for one that leaves a trail of snowflakes when you move the mouse. (The flakes disappear instantly when you stop moving it.) I chose a bright green for the snowflakes because they're equally visible on light or dark backgrounds.

Problem solved. I always know where the cursor is now. Macs are cool and the App Store makes life on a Mac even better.

Free stuff for Macs

It's amazing that there are so many open-source applications out there for Macs. I mean, first Apple gives you 17 tons of useful software with a new Mac -- and then you can download major programs for free.

For instance, I always use NeoOffice instead of Microsoft Office. I don't want anything Microsoft on my Mac. NeoOffice is a great replacement for Word and you can even save files in .doc format to exchange with poor slobs who are merely on PCs. You can download it here.

I also found an open-source Mac alternative for Adobe's Illustrator, which I never found easy to use but nevertheless relied on for simple tasks. I was sad to lose the program's functionality when I switched from a PC to a Mac about five years ago. Thankfully, I recently discovered Inkscape, an open-source program that pretty much does the same things as Illustrator. Mind you, this one isn't even halfway to a 1.0 designation -- it's very much a work in progress. But for the simple uses I plan for it, it seems fine. You can download Inkscape here.

And finally, I've just located an open-source substitute for PageMaker. I used to be a PageMaker maven on my PC, making newsletters for tons of good-guy organizations. I can really work PageMaker. When I switched to a Mac I bought Quark Express but I can't even transfer it to the new computer I just got, and anyway I hated it. So I recently downloaded Scribus, an open-source Mac alternative to PageMaker and Quark. This one is beyond 1.0 so it's pretty stable. I haven't used it yet (and it seems it may be difficult for folks who aren't already familiar with desktop-publishing concepts) but it seems quite functional, at least to me. I grok what all the buttons are for. You can download Scribus here.

So much free stuff! My thanks to all the developers who worked so hard to make these programs available for mere mortals. May they live long and prosper.