Silky Shark

Silky Shark is a tiny application made to enable mouse smoothing or pen tablet stabilization, giving users the possibility to adjust settings for programs or web canvases which don't have native support for this.

It's not necessary to set up this program. Instead, you have to make sure that the latest version of .NET Framework is installed on your PC. Other than that, you can unpack the downloaded archive and double-click the .exe to run the tool. There's another file in the package with help documentation.

The interface of Silky Shark consists of one window with a big power button for turning smoothing on and off, along with two sliders for tweaking the smoothing strength and interpolation.

Increasing the strength means favoring smoothness at the expense of accuracy (and vice versa). Meanwhile, increasing the interpolation means cleaner lines in exchange for processing power. Manual interpolation is practical for decreasing interpolation to get better performance.

You can also ask the tool to automatically set the interpolation as the strength increases or decreases, activate smooth on draw (only when the mouse or pen tablet is down), and switch from mouse to pen tablet mode. If you have multiple monitors connected to the computer, you can pick one for displaying the overlay. This option is particularly useful when you don't draw on the primary screen.

A circular, virtual cursor can be seen accompanying the mouse, so that you can compare the previous and current settings made with Silky Shark. Its color can be changed to anything else to better spot it in contrast with the screen colors.

From the settings panel, it's possible to disable the virtual cursor's overlay to boost performance, apply the overlay to all your monitors although this takes a toll on performance, and manually override the overlay's location and size (smaller size means better performance).

You can prevent the mouse cursor from catching up with the virtual cursor, snap the virtual cursor to the real one instead of the other way around (on "Smooth on Draw"), and pick a different cursor graphic than the circle and fill it with color.

In case of pen tablets, you can disable auto tablet detection so that you can manually toggle tablet mode in the main app window, adjust the tolerance, and override the tablet offset to specify the position of the real and virtual cursor.

From the last tab of the settings menu, it's possible to configure keyboard shortcuts in order to effortlessly enable and disable smoothing and overlay, toggle the display, switch to tablet mode, and increase or decrease the smoothing strength while Silky Shark is minimized to the taskbar.

The application worked smoothly on Windows 10 in our tests without putting a strain on system resources consumption. Although it doesn't seem like much at first sight, Silky Shark actually contains some useful options for enabling and controlling mouse or pen tablet smoothing and stabilization. It comes in handy for CAD and other graphic designers.