[iloatheny]

Can a Cocoa app manipulate system-wide features, such as mouse speed? If so, how?

Specifically, I'm trying to make a program which fine-tunes mouse behaviour, such as pointer speed, orientation, and acceleration. Can I go about this with Cocoa? Or would I have to dig down to the kernel level?

[Angus_D]

It's not at kernel level anyways, I don't think, since the kernel has nothing in it to do with the GUI. I think I heard somewhere that mouse speed was tweakable by a plist somewhere, but I'm not sure of what plist it would be.

It might be impossible to do exactly what you want, like pointer acceleration, since it's probably hardcoded into the OS, and I don't think there's a way of overriding these functions like you could in the previous Mac OS by using extensions.

[geran]

Kensington Mouseworks tunes the mouse speed. So it can be done.

[lindberg]

There are some APIs you can use to change the mouse speed on a system-wide basis -- this is what System Prefs does. However, the Mouse panel in System Prefs gives you as much flexibility as the low-level APIs do... it's just a speed setting. It may be possible to get a larger value shoved in there, but you'd probably have to find some private API to do this... you'd have to dig around in the Darwin code if you're interested.

To really affect things -- and to modify attributes other than speed easily -- then you'd probably have to write your own mouse driver.

[iloatheny]

Write my own mouse drivers? hmmm.. getting scary...

Could you tell me what API's are available for adjusting mouse / pointer settings?

And, don't you think Apple really should provide another slider in the mouse control panel for adjusting acceleration?