damn, nostalgia hit. i installed this as a kid when it was called mousepath, and the sight of the result was definitely part responsible for my amateur interest in graphics.
on the topic of graphic design, everything about the landing page (all images in a spritesheet btw), the press listing from gizmodo back when that meant something, what a class act. they really just don't make sites like this anymore. btw only just now clicked for me that one of the devs went on to pull that recent button stealer stunt; clearly his sense of technical fun hasn't dulled a bit over the years
I love emergent art like this. Would love to know of other projects that are similar - for example the generated videos showing the evolution of a git repository over time.
Does anyone remember a program from the mid-2000s that cataloged mouse movement, keys typed, time spent in applications, etc and charted these in a leaderboard-like system? I remember it calculating, for example, how many miles your mouse had moved. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it.
I'm running it right now, and haven't yet seen a single resulting artwork, but looking at the examples, I immediately hate the typical UI hotspots, like the top left (or top right) corner, toolbars on the left and such. I'd process the captured mouse coordinates and add a steady rotation to them (when the mouse is in motion), thus turning the art into a more abstract square (or circle, if you wish) form. Somewhat like the polar coordinates graphs, some of which are really cool.
This is cool but also it makes me think about the security implications of giving away your mouse movement data. Seems like creating realistic mouse movements can be valuable for defeating anti-scraping systems. Some security software even claims to uniquely identify a user based on their mouse movement.
Downloadable software can be doing all sorts of things that you might not be aware of. Recording mouse movements is probably the least of your worries. So be a bit wary about what you download, especially free software from unknown sources.
LOL. I've made a living selling downloadable software for the last 19 years. I wouldn't put any stock in anything a download sites says. I'm not sure anything has improved since this little experiment I did in 2007:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-award...
When I was a kid, I built a simple messenger one afternoon. It would send messages to any IP address with the software running on the other end. To show it off at school, I uploaded it to Sourceforge.
Today, this messenger is all over the internet and has won many awards, with rave reviews in several languages.
Regretfully, Softpedia has given it mere 3/5 stars.
Perhaps they had to knock a few stars off considering it’s probably now just an exe not meant to run on Windows of this century, Matryoska doll-ed in malware and installers that random software download sites added to it over decades.
Perhaps they can add an obfuscating randomizer to the movement pattern so the original mouse movement is distorted.
Same security issue goes for hackernews comments, there is a user identifiable pattern in the way you write sentences and paragraphs, although the fingerprint less certain then a mouse movement. With hacker news you could obfuscate it with pre-parsing a comment through an llm with some instructions.
Just like the CAD program, it comes down to the license. CAD software that, for example, has a student edition often has a license restriction forbidding using the software output for commercial purposes. It's up to the licensor to decide the terms they offer, and AFAIK, restricting commercial use is not a controversial license term from a legal perspective.
It gets a bit more controversial when the software adds exceedingly little to the creative process.
Can a pencil company dictate licensing terms of the artworks made with it? You know, legally — possibly. But ethically and morally — not even close.
CAD software adds a bit more to the engineering and design processes it is used in. There is a lot of IP, labor and money involved in building the software and its outputs.
Returning to the software at hand which records mouse movements into a raster image — that is trivial to code. It is an interesting idea, but singular, not a robust system of ideas necessary for anything like CAD. And has a lot of capital been invested to make this software possible? No.
It’s about what you give and what you take. It is a bit greedy to give very little and demand a lot.
