Recipe 9.12. Creating Animated Cursors

Problem

You want to create an animated mouse cursor.

Solution

Create a custom cursor as in Recipe 9.11, and create animation within the custom cursor's movie clip symbol.

Discussion

You can create animated cursors by extending upon the technique in Recipe 9.11. An animated cursor is simply a custom cursor in which the cursor movie clip symbol contains animationeither frame-based animation or ActionScript-based animation. For example, you can create a cursor of a spinning box by following the steps in Recipe 9.11, but within the cursor movie clip symbol, create a spinning box animation either by using a motion tween or by using ActionScript to continually update the rotation.