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How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad | TechCrunch

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Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic* work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years. The arrow waits on the screen. Slightly angled, with a straight edge and a 45 degree slope leading to a sharp pixel-by-pixel point. It’s an instrument of precision, of tiny click targets on a screen feet away. The original cursor was a dot, then a line pointing straight upwards. It was demonstrated in the ‘Mother of all demos’ — a presentation roughly an hour-and-a-half long that contained not only the world’s first look at the mouse but also hyper linking, document collaboration, video conferencing and more. The star of the show, though, was the small line of pixels that made up the mouse cursor. It was hominem in machina — humanity in the machine.* Unlik

How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad | TechCrunch How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad Apple SVP Craig Federighi talks about the iPad’s new cursor and Magic Keyboard Matthew Panzarino 6:13 AM PDT · May 6, 2020 Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic * work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years. The arrow waits on the screen. Slightly

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