Product Reviews

Anyone who regularly gives demonstrations using their Mac will know the problem of drawing the audience's attention to a specific area of the screen. The need to focus in on a single palette or menu is often overshadowed by the complexity of material appearing elsewhere.

Mousepose provides a neat solution. A user-defined hotkey creates a spotlight effect around the cursor, adding a dark tint to the remaining area, which neatly focuses attention without entirely obscuring the rest of the screen.

Everything about Mousepose is customisable: you can set the radius and blur amount of the spotlight, the opacity and colour of the outside area, and whether or not the effect automatically deactivates

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after a set time.

The start and end of the spotlight effect works best when animated, zooming in to the cursor position for added emphasis. An additional control allows clicked areas to be highlighted with a red dot for clarity; if you double or triple click, then the relevant number of concentric rings appear around the clicked area.

New to this version is the ability to display keystrokes. Now, rather than saying 'here I'm pressing option-shift-M to change the layer's mode to Multiply', you can just use the keystroke and the relevant symbols and letters will appear overlaid on a tint panel at the bottom of the screen. As with the main Mousepose effect, users can customise the font size and opacity of the displayed text, as well as the amount of time it remains on screen. A neat filter allows keystrokes to be displayed only when modifier keys are used in conjunction with them, to avoid every letter popping up as you save a file, say.

The interface is clear and easy to follow, but made even easier for new users by the addition of a 'talkthrough' button, which audibly talks you through all the features.

Mousepose does exactly what's needed for the job in hand. It won't make you work faster, but it will definitely make your demonstrations a whole lot slicker.