Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Day 18 - Mouse Heat Map

Where has your mouse pointer been going all day? While this app is running (located in systray) it will record everywhere your mouse goes. After a while, right click the icon, and get a full screen mouse heat map overlay.

The code was implemented smartly, and will not take up much RAM or CPU. It won't grow in consumption over time either (in theory...). It doesn't actually record the mouse, it just records a hit count for a giant grid of points.

NOTE: This is not multi-monitor friendly as of yet. It will only do your primary monitor. When I get the time, I will fix

Yet another sweet app... Where are the naysayers now? Certainly not posting in my comment section any longer. w00t!

Digg!  Download the app here
  Download the source here

As a reminder, I code an app every evening, starting at the time posted above. All code sessions are observed over WebEx, and the app idea is decided on the fly. Thanks tonight to Rajio - who had this idea, and to the code project's Christian Graus whose example of gaussian blur code I ripped (and credited).

23 Comments:

At 2:12 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

That's nice :)

It doesn't seem to support my multi-irregular-monitor setup, where's support for that? Slack! :)

 
At 3:48 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

So where's the mac version ;-)

 
At 7:21 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello, i'm Danny
cool stuff! really!

can you please say in what programming language you code your software?

 
At 9:50 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

is there something out there like this i can throw on my website so i can see a heat map of my vistor clicks?

 
At 10:13 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey! I like this a lot as I can actually see my productivity in some way other than WPM (which isn't exactly accurate for OO languages).

But, I wouldn't call it RAM friendly though. It's constantly taking up more than 40mb at any given period.

My colleague has the same setup, but his only peaks that high when he views the heat map, so it looks like something on my PC is making it higher. :(

 
At 12:51 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

RAM usage is VERY VERY high

 
At 12:56 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

RAM usage is only high after generating a heat map, and before garbage collection runs. idle your pc and you'll see it drops below 15MB again.

 
At 1:36 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

did u code this using .NET ? if so then there are ways to force garbage collection

 
At 1:12 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

There is no reason to force garbage collection. It will run when needed. I'm only pointing it out for those being picky about the RAM usage.
Forcing garbage collection is useful in a .NET application when you're at a point in your code where you know you want the CPU to use it's time doing that instead of something else. Such a situation is VERY rare, and should only be done if proven needed.
It's a common beginner mistake to force collection in your code because you think you're being helpful. In fact, you're accomplishing little to nothing.

 
At 4:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have 2GB RAM; I don't mind 40MB for any application. Mouse heat map running now, thank you!

 
At 8:52 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dana,

As I mentioned, it's that high even when I haven't viewed the heat map.

Literally, if I left my computer and came back to it and hour later, it would still be over 40mb.

 
At 12:40 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can't explain it, but I have found some .net apps take up more ram on some PC than others. I have even see where a process that is doing the exact same work has gone from 30 megs to 5 megs over a days time. Again, I couldn't explain it as I know garbage collection was forced occurred several times a minute so it wasn't related to that. Anyone else seen this?

 
At 2:25 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have you looked into making a Widget for Yahoo and/or Google?

 
At 10:23 AM, Blogger Cristian Contini said...

for the websites, the only app online i know is

http://www.crazyegg.com

still in beta (sems not working on my blogger blog) but fantastic!

 
At 9:33 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just to let you know. I am running side-by-side monitors with nVidia nView in Horizontal Span configuration, and the heatmouse app works dandy. I guess you were referring to multiple desktops, as in hidden views? Thanks for the app~!

 
At 8:55 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

With Horizontal Span Windows thinks it´s just 1 monitor, but a very wide one, the drivers then split it across the monitors, if you have a dual view then it will see 2 monitor´s and only work with 1 of them.

 
At 2:29 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very cool ap. I was searching for heat map code in cpp or c, and I found this one.

 
At 1:41 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is a great tool especially when cross referenced with times and dates that could be correspondent to other communication systems . A/O

 
At 7:47 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

it looks nice.

 
At 4:27 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Hey if you're running a blog or website and want to check people's mouse movements and clicks on your site, subscribe for SeeVolution - a free website analytics software. Head to SeeVolution.com to check it out.

 
At 10:45 PM, Blogger prathiba reddy said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 10:46 PM, Blogger prathiba reddy said...

excellent application, i have seen heat map softwares for websites but never for a desktop. this is really fantastic.

custom usb flash drive

 
At 6:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The first-ever click heatmap that is interactive and seamlessly integrated with mouse heatmap ’s Link AnalyticsTM. Now you can see everywhere your visitors’ click, even where they are not supposed to, along with innovative statistics on all link interactions.

 

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