Kenrick Mock has just announced on his blog that the new versions of PenAttention and CursorAttention (v1.4) are now available from http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/PenAttention/
He has also provided some videos to show how to use the latest new features.
Thanks Kenrick!
Quoting from Kenrick’s blog post:
There are two new features:
1) Hotkey to turn the highlight on or off. You can use either CTRL-F9 or CTRL-ALT-F9. This can be handy on a Tablet PC if you map the hotkey to one of the hardware buttons.2) Option to use a custom image in place of the default pencil. Create your image file as a PNG and name it CustomPen.png and put it in the program installation folder. Restart PenAttention and it will use the new image if you select the pencil tool.
See https://explainingmaths.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/high-visibility-pointers-for-teaching-and-screencasts/ for the way I use the new features.
I found that there was a slight clash with <ctrl><f9> and PDF Annotator: that key combination always puts PDF Annotator back into pen writing mode. I will see whether <ctrl><alt><f9> avoids this.
Happy holidays!
Joel
Explaining mathematics 
I am now using the new Cursor Attention successfully (Pen attention will not run on my tablet for some reason.)
The ctrl+alt+f9 combination is fine for me: it does not appear (so far!) to clash with anything else.
One warning though. You should not have Cursor Attention running when you try to configure the tablet button to produce the relevant key combination. Otherwise (at least on my tablet) Cursor Attention will intercept the key combination and will prevent it from registering with the tablet button configuration utility (which is one of the tabs in my tablet and pen control panel).
Joel
LikeLike
Tablet buttons (those pesky buttons you find below the screen on most models of tablet) are very useful once you can start to personalize them.
When the Toshiba Portege tablets we’ve got are in tablet mode they are the only shortcuts available to save the painful process of right-clicking and turning things on and off. After some searching I’ve found that Toshiba, at least, don’t install the drivers to personalize them by default. I found them at what they call the “Tablet PC Button Driver“
LikeLike
A better alternative: Presentation Pointer which has more features: Spotlight, Mouse Clicks Effect, Keystrokes and Live Drawing.
LikeLike
Thanks for that suggestion.
Of course, Cursor Attention is free, and it currently does exactly what I need. (See https://explainingmaths.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/high-visibility-pointers-for-teaching-and-screencasts)
But I will be interested to know whether others have found problems using Cursor Attention and have needed, or benefited from, the extra features of Presentation Pointer.
Joel
LikeLike