Changing the Mouse Cursor with Flash 5

Introduction

Flash, in this fifth version, is being targeted more towards a full application-building tool - much like say, Macromedia Director or Microsoft Visual Basic. So, many features available in this two packages are now available to Flash 5.

There is at least one feature that I know users will love: the ability to replace the standard mouse cursor by anything you like, just like you did in Director or Visual Basic. Well, not exactly replacing the mouse cursor, but using some "tricks" to act as so.

Read on.

Well, one of the most impressive features on Flash 5's scripting is the ability to control "objects" and their properties, much like any other "real" languages do. Fortunately, "mouse" is one of these objects.

To make your movie use another cursor besides the standard one is a quite simple task, and possible in just a few steps and actions that can be placed on the first frames of your movie. However, there are some downsides with this technique that I will discuss at the end of this article.