Blink custom cursor

Question

Hi to all.
I'm having problems changing the look of the cursor of my app. Sometimes, when the user let the mouse pointer on certain areas of the principal panel, the cursor look must change for a custom look that I have created. The problem is that when I change the aspect of the system cursor, for my custom cursor, it start to blink sometimes, and it stays blinking when I move it on areas where the cursor have to have this custom look. I'm using a code like this.
All this is into a class that extends from JPane.
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
        Toolkit toolkit = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit();
        Image image = toolkit.getImage("CrearTransiciones.gif");
        Point hotSpot = new Point(15, 15);
        Cursor cursor = toolkit.createCustomCursor(image, hotSpot, "CrearTransiciones");
        if (cursorIsOver().equals(ZoneOver.Zone1)) {
            setCursor(cursor);
        } else {
           if (cursorIsOver().equals(ZoneOver.Zone2)) {
               setCursor(new Cursor(Cursor.DEFAULT_CURSOR));
           } else {
              if (cursorIsOver().equals(ZoneOver.Zone3)) {
                  setCursor(new Cursor(Cursor.CROSSHAIR_CURSOR));
}I have also proved to set the hotSpot into the (0, 0) point, but I'm still having the same problem.
Someone knows what I have to do to avoid the annoying blinking?
Thanks for read.

Answer 1

I think the problem may be the fact that you are changing the cursor in paintComponent() regardless of what the cursor currently is; I would change the code to check if the cursor is already the cursor you want it to be; if so then skip the setCursor().
You are fetching the image every time a paintComponent() call is made. That is not very efficient. I would fetch the image once (in the constructor perhaps?), store the cursor in a member variable and just use it whenever you need it. The rule is that a paint() or paintComponent() call should take as little time as possible, loading and decoding an image from disk is not exactly a fast action.
Also, you are aware that you can do "else if" in stead of nesting the if statements like that?