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Smoothmouse for OS X (improving your mouse responsiveness)
Smoothmouse.com is an exercise in how NOT to sell your product, there’s almost zero information on what SmoothMouse is. What smoothmouse does is remove a latency bug that’s existed from 10.4 - 10.8.x. It is not a mouse accelerator or anything to do with altering your cursor vectors.
Visiting the smoothmouse.net forums has the full story.
Fact: the on-screen pointer lags behind the mouse (or trackpad) in OS X more than in other operating systems, such as Windows or Ubuntu Linux.
To sum up:
- The problem has been confirmed by an Apple engineer (thanks to him for that) in an email correspondence with me. He has also mentioned that they were working on a solution.
- The problem has existed at least since OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. The current version of OS X (10.8 “Mountain Lion”) still exhibits the problem.
- Many people confuse lag with acceleration, this is what my blog post was about.
Solutions:
- SmoothMouse.
- Running Mac as a Synergy client with a mouse connected to another computer running Synergy server.
- Using Wacom tablet instead of a mouse.
There’s even a quote from id software legend John Caramack concerning OS X’s mouse lag. I used to think it was the latency was induced by the LCDs I used but its always been ever present.