Rise of the cursors

Published by Vlasta on February 11th 2013.

Hooray! The cursor library here on rw-designer is now #1 on Google when searching for "cursors". This is good news for every cursor author, because their creations will be seen and downloaded by more people. It took the effort of numerous cursor authors, reviewers and fans and long 7 years to reach that #1 spot and I want to use this opportunity to express my thankfulness to all of them.

A bit of history

The cursor library started in July 2006 (click to see the old version) as an experiment and I am really happy about how it turned out. Initially, it was only possible to upload cursors via the cursor editor and the application was responsible for providing a preview and information about the cursor.

Few years later, support for web uploading was added. In order to allow that, I needed to analyze the .cur and .ani files on the web server and extract a preview image and cursor properties. The web script can extract animated previews from cursors and supports cursors with multiple resolutions (Windows 7 cursors). Not only this means comfort for the authors, it also prevents uploading of malicious files and makes the downloads secure. As far as I know, no other web offers this feature.

Highlights

At this point, there are 1859 cursor sets created by 616 authors. The quality of sets varies a lot, some are amazing, others not worth a second look, majority of them are OK.

Let's look at some extraordinary sets:

RuneScape Cursors - the 6th set in the library. When I first saw it, I was not impressed (and remember having to fix some of the cursors, because they were not square). But it started a true madness. It was downloaded more than 100 000 times and while it was most popular, it was seen by more than 1000 people each day. It also inspired other cursor authors. Today, there are 84 Rune Scape sets. That is something one must respect.

MechBlade Cursors - incredibly detailed and smooth cursors with 32x32 and 48x48 images. Created in Blender in 3D, this set is closest to what I call technical perfection.

Skyrim Cursors - cursors inspired by a popular game, but not directly copied from it. This set went viral on Reddit.

The future

While the cursor library is doing well, it has its problems. The library is open to everyone, authors, reviewers, or occasional visitors. Some authors take cursor designing very seriously, others are just killing some free time. Some visitors leave useful and valuable feedback, others visit just to troll.

Some authors do not respect copyright and I occasionally have to delete whole sets, which is time consuming and annoying. Exceptional and low quality sets are mixed up and visitors may have hard time finding what they want. These are the main problems, I see. These are things I would like to improve in the future.