It seems as far back as I can remember, I’ve never been happy with the tracking speed of any OS version or mouse I had connected to my Mac—or the software to control the speed with which my cursor flies around the screen.

I’ve always wanted to speed up the movement, or slow it down—depending on if it was an Apple mouse or 3rd party one. Almost all 3rd party drivers either lack features, don’t work at all, or are overkill.

Smooth Cursor aims to solve a lot of those problems, and it does so perfectly.

Smooth Cursor for Mac OS X Lion is a simple utility that lives in your menubar which allows you to adjust the tracking speed of any mouse or trackpad you have connected, or the built-in trackpad on your MacBook. That’s all it does. There are no superfluous features to speak of (NICE!), and it basically only has three settings: Off, On, and Enforce—which forces any app to respect your settings if it tries to override them.

I love Smooth Cursor because it can work with a mouse and trackpad independently. This is perfect for me because I prefer to speed-up my Apple Magic Mouse tracking, but slow down the tracking on my attached Magic Trackpad.

Smooth Cursor is a 64-bit application for Mac OS X Lion, and is absolutely free.

Cinemagraph: the latest craze in web images (Image: From Me To You photography blog)

There’s no Flash, no fancy JQuery, Javascript, or HTML5 going on behind the scenes with the image above. No, the image above is a plain old fashioned .gif file at its heart. Of course, there’s nothing plain about how this Cinemagraph was made.

Cinemagraph is finding its way onto a lot of websites because there’s no compatibility issues to deal with, and it has a fairly low technical barrier. Anyone with a copy of Adobe Photoshop and a video camera can produce a Cinemagraph image.

Check out these 28 sample Cinemagraph images, then when you’re ready to start making your own, visit Tested.com for a simple Cinemagraph tutorial.