Last updated Aug 11, 2026 at 10:21pm

The blog has been quiet for a while. There is a reason for that, although it is not a particularly glamorous one: the CPU in my work computer died.

It did not slowly fade away or give me a thoughtful warning first. One minute I had a workstation; the next I had a decorative box full of fans.

Since my last computer build was in 2020, I went shopping with 2020 prices still lodged somewhere in my head. That was optimistic. RAM costs more, storage costs more, and graphics cards have apparently decided they are real estate.

After an unplanned rebuild, a lot of file moving, and the usual moment of wondering which cable I forgot, the new machine is running and I am back at the desk. The blog paused while all of that was happening, but work on the site kept moving, which is why there is quite a bit to catch up on.

The Cursor Editor launched on June 8, and plenty has changed since. Some of it is genuinely new, like a proper Brush tool and a live preview you can actually click around in. A lot of it is the quieter kind of work: fixing the thing that broke when you resized the window, making a counter update when it's supposed to.

On the Main Site

• Search testing is still underway: We are testing a hybrid search system that combines regular keyword matching with semantic search, which looks at the meaning of a query instead of relying only on exact words. We are also testing better handling for short searches in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai, along with more varied related-cursor results that do not crowd the page with near-duplicates from the same set. This is still being tuned, so relevance and behavior may change as we learn what works best. We may also move to a different AI language or embedding model in the future if it produces better results for the library.
• Counters that keep up: View and rating numbers on cursor pages refresh more reliably. And unrated cursors now show a neutral three-star state, rather than looking like somebody already left them a bad review.
• Credit where it's due: Cursor pages can display more than one linked creator. If you're collaborating, remixing, or building on someone else's artwork, everyone involved gets named.
• Previews that stay in their lane: Oversized live previews are held to a sensible display size, and we fixed several layout bugs that let page decorations or remix info sit on top of the artwork.
• Bigger uploads: The cap went from 2 MB to 4 MB, so detailed artwork and longer animations have room to fit.
• Animated multi-size hotspots, fixed: Animated cursors with several image sizes packed inside were getting their hotspots wrong. They now click from the position you set.
• Fresher info pages: The About page, FAQ, roadmap, contact details, and submission links have all been brought up to date.

Most of this you'll never notice directly, which is sort of the point.

In the Editor

The editor has grown a lot since June.

• A real Brush: There's now an antialiased Brush with adjustable size, opacity, and hardness, sitting alongside the Pencil rather than replacing it. Pencil for sharp pixel work, Brush when you want soft edges.
• Transform every frame at once: Flips, rotations, custom angles, and scaling can be applied to the active layer across every visible, non-empty animation frame. The whole batch counts as one action, so a single Undo takes it all back.
• Drafts that don't eat your work: An older autosave could finish late and overwrite newer artwork. Now switching between cursors and sizes waits for the current version to be stored first.
• Sharper thumbnails everywhere: Workspace, multi-size, layer, and animation thumbnails all run through the same renderer now. Thin details survive, previews stay crisp on high-resolution displays, and stale cached thumbnails refresh on their own.
• Website-ready Base64 CSS: The Export panel can generate cursor CSS for websites on request. Static cursors use compact lossless PNG data, while animated web cursors can use optimized WebP or lossless PNG.
• A Live Preview worth using: Test the actual browser cursor over an interactive surface, with animation playing, different backgrounds, and a hotspot trail that shows exactly where your clicks are landing.
• Animated imports respect Smooth: GIF and WebP imports now honor the Smooth resize option, and the preview updates when you toggle between Smooth and Crisp, so what you commit matches what you were looking at.
• 64px canvases by default: New projects start at 64×64 pixels, a far more useful jumping-off point for modern cursors.
• Better submitting: Pick a Windows cursor role right in the Submit window, send several standalone cursors in one batch, and get a heads-up about missing or duplicate roles while you're assembling a set.
• Submission guidelines, in progress: We're writing a proper guide for preparing cursors before you submit them. We've had to reject a lot of submissions for the same handful of reasons: hotspots in the wrong place, a small cursor floating on an unnecessarily huge canvas, artwork that isn't quite there yet. It isn't fair to keep turning people away without explaining what we're looking for, so the guide will lay out the requirements and show how to fix the common problems up front.
• Multiple creators, one more license: Submissions can credit several creators and creator links, which helps with collaborations and remix attribution. CC BY-SA 4.0 is now available as a submission license too.
• Clearer onboarding: A first-run welcome screen and an About/FAQ drawer walk through the main editor workflows, with better keyboard handling and accessibility while dialogs are open.
• And a long tail of fixes: Interrupted drawing gestures, selections near canvas edges, undo and redo, fast workspace switching, cursor-set downloads, high-DPI canvas rendering, animated thumbnail refreshes. Small on their own. Together, a much less annoying editor.

The editor is still very much a work in progress, and your feedback shapes where it goes more than anything else does. Send suggestions to tor@cursors-4u.com.

Bug reports are just as welcome. If something behaves strangely, or an import or export comes out wrong, tell us. A lot of these are nearly impossible to find until someone stumbles into them.

An Update on Multi-Size Animated Cursors

Back in April, I wrote Windows Supports Multi-Size Animated Cursors, Sort Of about the strange point where a perfectly reasonable-looking animated cursor can meet the Windows loader and simply stop working. The post ended by asking anyone who knew the exact reason to get in touch.

Someone did. A reader emailed to say they had found the answer.

If that was you, I owe you an apology for the silence. I did see your message, and I have not forgotten about it. I simply have not had the chance to give your findings the proper Windows testing they deserve. After spending so much time testing the original problem, I do not want to publish an answer until I can reproduce it and understand exactly what it explains.

Once I have tested it, I will either publish a follow-up post or update the original article with the results. Either way, I will credit the person who sent the answer, with their permission. Thank you for taking the time to investigate it and for doing exactly what that post asked readers to do.

What's Next: A User System

The big one we're starting to explore is a user system for Cursors-4U.

I'm taking this one slowly. We've never had accounts on the site, and a user system touches almost everything: creator profiles, submissions, favorites, and the rest of the community side. I'd rather get it right than get it out quickly.

There's a lot still undecided about how those pieces should fit together, and the existing browser-based features need careful handling as the design takes shape.

We'll share more once the foundation is further along. In the meantime, if there's an account feature you'd actually use, tell us. That's genuinely useful to hear right now.

Thanks for browsing, creating, submitting, and sharing cursors with us. There's plenty more coming.