Make It Easier To See Your Cursor And Clicks On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you five ways to emphasize your cursor and mouse clicks while doing live presentations or screen recordings.

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So I'm often asked about how I get my cursor to be more visible on the screen and to show mouse clicks in my videos. Even if you don't to tutorials, like I do, but do live presentations it's a good idea to make the cursor more noticeable so people can see where it is and also to show on the screen when you click the mouse. It's also handy, sometimes, to have key presses shown on the screen as well. Let's take a look at a variety of different ways to do this.

First let's look at something you can do without adding any additional software. If you go into System Preferences and then to Accessibility look for Display. Now you would think that you would go to Pointer Control to change the size of the cursor. But actually under Display there's a Tab here for Cursor and you could increase the cursor size. You can see how much larger I can make it. This alone makes the cursor so much more visible for presentations. But also just for using it yourself if you find the normal size sometimes gets lost.

Now if you need to show clicks while screen recording you can do this using the default screen recording built into your Mac. Use Shift Command 5 and then switch to Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion. Then click Options and make sure you have Show Mouse Clicks selected. Now when you record mouse clicks will show up. I'm going to click in a couple of different locations here. You don't see it while you're recording. But when I stop recording and then look at the result here you'll see those clicks. They appear as circles whenever you click.

So next let's look at some third party apps that add a lot of functionality. One that's been around for a long time from a well known Mac developer is Mousepose by Boinx Software. So this is a subscription for $10 a year. It does have a free trial. So once you've granted it the proper permissions you could do a whole bunch of different things here. For instance the default, when activated, is to actually highlight the area and dim everything else. You can control the circle radius, the blur, the opacity, and how it animates when you turn it on and off. Then you can record a shortcut so that you can turn it on when you need and turn it off when you don't. You can also go in and do things with different mouse clicks as well. So you can activate this and every time I click you can see I get a little red dot. I can customize that to look all sorts of different ways.

Mousepose also will show key strokes on the screen. So when you do something like I can hold the Shift key down there, for instance, the Command key and you can see those. Press the spacebar and you can that. So it's really useful for live presentations getting all that information up there on the screen.

Now if you want to go with an app that's in the Mac App Store you can look for Presentation Assistant. It costs $3.00. So when you run it you can see here I get a highlight around the cursor. You can change that by going to Mouse Pointer here. You can change it to Ring, Spotlight which dims the rest of the screen, or disk which doesn't. You can change the size for any of these, and the opacity, blur, the color. You can record a shortcut to turn this on. For mouse clicks you can also set some things like, you know, exactly what color is used here for the click. You can see it's a nice circle effect when I click on the screen. You can even have a different color for a two finger or right click on a mouse. You can easily control it up here to turn it on or off.

So I know I'm going to be asked what I actually do. How do I get my cursor movements, clicks, and key presses shown in my videos. Well, actually I don't use any of those techniques. Instead I use professional screen recording software, ScreenFlow, to record everything. When it does it records everything just as I see it. But it remembers the position of the cursor. It remembers all the clicks and all the key presses. So in editing I can change those. So, for instance,  here's the screen recording. I can flip through that and maybe you can see the cursor there. It's pretty small because it's the regular size. But I can go and change the pointer zoom and actually make the cursor bigger. So now you could see it's the same recording but the cursor size is different. So I have control over that in editing, not while recording. I can also change the click effect, to say a radar effect, and you could see the clicks there. Or inverting the cursor. I can also change to have an attention effect here. So here's a circle, basically, that follows the cursor. I could change all sorts of things about that. I can show keystrokes so that here's some keystrokes and you can see the keys there pressed at the bottom of the screen. You could even add a sound for each click. So a lot that you can do if using professional screen recording software. Even some inexpensive screen recording software will allow you to do various different things with the cursor.

The big advantage to this is that the recording is actually of the screen. Exactly as I see it. I can alter all of this while editing. In fact I can even have it change different parts. So some parts I can have clicks shown and other parts maybe not. Some parts can have key presses shown and other parts not. Nothing is permanently imbedded in the screen recording. It's only when I export that it's actually printed onto the video.

These aren't the only ways to do this. You'll find more apps in and out of the Mac App Store. You'll find different options in different screen recording software. Of course if you're doing screen recording and editing your video afterwards you can use all sorts of different techniques for highlighting things on the screen including where the cursor is located and what you're clicking on.