To be honest, I don't notice anymore, but when I started using plasma, the bouncy cursor felt a little cheap and gimmicky to me. Do you guys think it is time for a redesign? Giving feedback that your application is starting is important. However, this animation reminds more of the old bouncy ball widget, than the breeze design.

Or just use the busy cursor from the breeze theme

I think it's implemented as a Kwin effect (someone correct me if I'm wrong); Perhaps it could be extended to offer a few styles, such as pulse, fade, wobble, etc...

I don't know about using the busy cursor, the HIG on that one is to show an application is busy on mouse-over, but when an application is starting it would need to be omnipresent, which would probably make users think the system or desktop is lagging.

I wouldn't mind creating another (new) animation for the existing cursors (something like "cursor-background-working") for this situation if users wanted a specific cursor animation, but I don't know about the technical side of things whether it would be simple or arduous to activate the new animation. It would also mean Breeze would probably be the *only* cursor set offering that option, so it wouldn't work for other cursor sets.

I don't know about plasma 5, but there used to be several styles instead of the bouncy cursor that you could switch from. Part of why I don't like it very much (besides its cartoonish feeling) is because it provides, IMO, irrelevant information. Feedback on an application that is being started is useful, however, showing its icon bouncing next to your cursor, besides an entry on the task manager, right after you clicked on the application's icon or typed its name to launch it, is overkill.

Kver wrote:I think it's implemented as a Kwin effect (someone correct me if I'm wrong)

Not generally - it's a technical detail.
The original implementation is a small window with a complex bitmask that is attached to the cursor - iow: incredibly inefficient (and aliased

When the compositor is up (and the effect enabled), it intercepts the event and paints the desired effect (the code is more or less copied) directly into the scene.
(W/ alphablending, antialiasing etc.)

That said: it's the first thing I deactivate in every KDE installation, but there's talk this is some sort of "trademark" - but I don't like it.
Not the bouncing, not the glowing and not the still icon. Stuff that needs ages to come up shall please be fixed or at least have a splash screen.

Personally I don't like any of the cursor effects, and especially not the bounce cursor. It looks cheap and unprofessional to me. I think we should still allow some "fun" parts of the desktop, but this animation in particular makes Plasma look old and unpolished in my opinion.

With that said, I know that there are people who like this feature. I think I read somewhere that someone said that they loved it and it was one of the things that made them switch over.

I prefer to just have the launch feedback in the taskbar (actually, I currently don't even have that; SSDs are pretty nice...), but I'm sure there are people who would want to keep the mouse feedbacks. So to keep the discussion constructive, how about discussing

1. What the default settings should be, and
2. How we can make the mouse launch feedbacks more modern.

To kick off the discussion on 2, here are some loading spinners my friend did with CSS that may provide some inspiration: http://tobiasahlin.com/spinkit/

luebking wrote:That said: it's the first thing I deactivate in every KDE installation, but there's talk this is some sort of "trademark" - but I don't like it.
Not the bouncing, not the glowing and not the still icon. Stuff that needs ages to come up shall please be fixed or at least have a splash screen.

Funny, the first thing I do is turning off the splash screens in Amarok, KDenlive, Digikam and the like.

"at least" - it's not like i'd advocate splashscreens.

But the only things worse than a dead GUI is a lazy GUI.
Neither a bouncing cursor nor a flashing task item provides the required "yes, I'm alive and doing something" message.

Personally, agree with this - IMO the launch feedback in the taskbar is more than enough for me too:

Hans wrote:Personally I don't like any of the cursor effects, and especially not the bounce cursor. It looks cheap and unprofessional to me. I think we should still allow some "fun" parts of the desktop, but this animation in particular makes Plasma look old and unpolished in my opinion.

If we decide we must have a feedback animation on the mouse pointer, what about something small & subtle like a small pulsing behind the mouse pointer (centered on the pointer) - a bit like the 5th one in the mockups that Hans posted (the plain circle getting bigger) but less than half the size and appearing behind the mouse pointer??

Just to be clear - i don't think the above idea adds anything to just having the feedback in the taskbar & still seems needless, cheap & not that 'professional' like Hans said.

The 7th one - with the 3 horizontal dots looks a bit like some animations that TalkTalk (an ISP in the UK) use alot so maybe steer clear of that one!!

I can only second the statement of Hans. I think bouncy cursor should not be default.