Mousetrails

No, this isn’t a picture of Ralph Steadman’s pen ejaculating all over a Jackson Pollock painting.

This is what it looks like when I work.

I’ve been seeing internerd scuttlebutt (that was for you, Chris) around the web about Anatoliy Zenkov‘s awesome and awesomely weird little application that records the movement of your mouse for as long as you let it, and had to give in and do one of my own. Dots indicate a mouse pointer at rest. The longer at rest, the bigger the dot grows (my biggest dot was no doubt from my 30-minute lunch break). Lines are obviously mouse movement.

It’s good clean nerd fun to see the areas of your desktop you utilize the most. You can overlay your mousetrails with a screenshot of what you were working on and get a good idea of what it is you were clicking and dragging the most.

This overlay is a super rough estimate for me, since my job requires switching back and forth between several windows and applications. I’m not just laying out pages; I’m copy editing stories, reading e-mails, scanning local blogs, posting to The Memphis Blog, and more. So I just zoomed out on the A1 I was working on. But still. You can certainly see how often I have to select applications in the task bar and then minimize them to switch to another one, and how much I rely on the tools around the perimeter of my window in Fred, our page layout program.

Nerd out for yourself and download the program: Mac or PC.