Works great and lots of options

These comments are based on using the app on a Mid 2012 MacBook Air with 10.10.5 Yosemite.

I tried a few Mouse Locator app but it would not respond to activation keys and you had to enable it every time you logged on (something to watch for) so I decided to splurge on Simple Mouse Locator.

It works very well. Mouse highlighting is enabled using one or more of keystrokes, mouse waving, moving the mouse after a period of inactivity, and crossing between screens. The latter is great because I have a Dell U3415 connected to my MBA. The screen resolutions are very different and the mouse jumps vertically when crossing between them so it readily disappears from view. The keystroke options include 1-3 taps of the modifier keys (e.g. Shift) as well as hotkey combo’s. I prefer the former because (1) they’re simpler than finger-stretching hotkey combo’s, (2) they normally have no function so you won’t accidentally do something silly, and (3) there’s less chance of overwriting standard hotkey combo’s. I had trouble testing hotkey combo’s as it appears only some modifier keys can be used (e.g. Fn/F6 would work but not Control/F6); the default is all 4 modifier keys plus the Space bar. The mouse waving options include 1-6 waves either vertically or horizontally (who’d want 1???)

The highlighting options include the diameter and thickness of the ring, it’s inner and outer colours, and some animation options. The latter don’t seem very important but the colours are because you wouldn’t likely want the highlighting to be the same colour as your screen background. Having two colours helps ensure highlighting works with different backgrounds, which is good design.

I tested the app with the MBA’s keyboard and mouse pad as well as an old Logitech keyboard and mouse connected via a hub and everything still worked, i.e. double Shift key taps and mouse waving still highlighted the mouse pointer.

So, overall it works very well with the only quirk being the acceptable hotkey combo’s are a mystery. Not bad for $1.39 CAD.

Docaboo about Simple Mouse Locator, v1.5