Your operating system is about to become more interesting.

According to AppleInsider, the company is exploring new ways to use the Mac OS X cursor to provide additional information and usability files residing on a hard drive or linked over the Internet prior to their being triggered or activated.

A patent published on Thursday describes a user's wish to know more about a file prior to opening it as well as a lack of information to state whether the item is useful.

Per the patent, the appearance of an on-screen cursor may change to a text entry cursor (vertical bar) when positioned in a text entry field, or morph into a hand or arrow when positioned over a movable object, which offers some information as to the type of input operation that can be performed.

"However, such limited information generally fails to provide useful information about a target item referenced by a user-activatable element," Apple wrote. "In particular, current user interfaces do not generally provide any technique for providing detailed information about a target within a cursor in a manner that is responsive and dynamically controllable by the user."

Within the document, Apple has proposed methods for changing to appearance of an on-screen cursor to provide excerpts as to the content of the target, what applications are available to the target file as well as the meta-data or other descriptive information associated with the target.

One method described in the filing essentially relates to making Apple's QuickLook technology -- currently available in Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), and system icons in Mac OS X Snow Leopard betas -- accessible to the cursor.

Similarly, a mouse-over can present the user with an icon representing the type of document associated with link when a thumbnail image is not available or cannot be read quickly enough to provide satisfactory response time.

Other useful mouse-over events that could take place would include the display of operations a user can perform on the file. Without activating the file, dragging it to a dock icon, or using a contextual menu, the user can choose to initiate a slideshow, email the file, send the file via iChat, or begin playing or displaying the file. For example, a mouse-over event on a text file would allow the user to open the file in either Word, BBedit, Pages, or TextEdit.

The 17-page patent filing is credited to Apple engineer John Louch.

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