The most common way of changing a cursor in Flash apps seems to be based on simply hiding the native OS cursor and displaying a graphic (drawn by the Flash Player) inside the Flash rectangle where the (hidden) cursor would be. This is what mx.managers.CursorManager does, for example. The reason why I find this approach unacceptable is that Flash Player isn't nearly fast enough at updating the cursor graphic, leading to some very visible lag in the cursor movement, which I find to be a pretty fundamental usability problem and annoyance, making the whole app seem slower than it really is.
On the other hand, I've noticed that the CSS cursor property implementation in browsers works like it should -- i.e. there's no visible lag in the cursor movement when using it to implement a custom mouse cursor.
So my question is: is there any way to use the CSS cursor property (or any other method that doesn't involve lagging, slow cursor movement) to change the cursor on top of a Flash rectangle?
I've already tried to change the cursor style property for a Flash element (or a Div wrapper around the Flash element) via JavaScript, but didn't seem to get it to work. Has anyone successfully done something like this?
Native cursors are available in Flash Player 10.2 beta. So you should give it a try! See: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=2373