Have you ever wondered just how far your cursor travels in the course of a workday? Or how far it’s gone in the past year?
••• “Golly, I sure have. But how can I find out?”
I’m glad you asked. Just drop the Mouse Odometer INIT in your System Folder and reboot the Macintosh. The Mouse Odometer will watch your cursor and start recording, in miles, how far it travels onscreen. The Odometer will adjust its measurements based on your screen resolution, so it will accurately report distance for third-party monitors, as well as standard ones.
••• “Yeah, well, ok. But how can I SEE how far my mouse has gone?”
Just run the Mouse Odometer application. A small window will appear with two odometer dials. The top dial shows how far, in miles, your cursor has travelled since you installed the Mouse Odometer INIT. The bottom cursor shows how far it has gone since you last booted up the machine. The black-on-white cells in the dial represent whole numbers, and the inverted (white-on-black) ones are for decimal places. Thus, the maximum distance the odometer can show is 10,000.00000 miles. After this distance (my estimate is that it would be reached after about 275 years) the odometer will “roll over” back to zero.
Click on the “trip” button to reset the bottom dial (The “Trip Odometer”). This might be fun if you want to measure “miles per document” or something.
The Mouse Odometer application is Multifinder-friendly. It will do its work quite happily in the background. It will also save its window position in a small preferences file in the System Folder, so you can easily set it up as a Startup application under Multifinder and always have the Odometer dials onscreen. To hide the Window, just choose “Hide Window” from the File menu. Choose “Show Window” to bring it back.
Alternatively, you may not want to run the application all the time. That’s fine, too. The INIT will continue to accumulate mileage even if you aren’t watching it with the application, so you can just forget about it until you’re interested, and then run the application to see your progress.
••• “You jerk. I don’t have enough memory to run Multifinder. I hate when people write these things and I can’t use them.”
Not to worry! The Mouse Odometer INIT doesn’t care if you’re using the Finder or Multifinder, so you can leave the INIT to accumulate mileage for you. When you’d like to check up on how far the cursor has gone, just run the application. It will run under the Finder without any problems.
••• “So are you going to bleed me dry for this thing or what?”
Absolutely not. The Mouse Odometer is meant for fun, and is priced accordingly. It’s shareware, so play with it for awhile before you decide if it’s something you’d like to keep. If it is, purchase it for $5, which should be sent to the address at the end of this README file. I also welcome any comments or bug reports (although I won’t be thrilled to hear the latter).
Registered users (i.e., those who fork over the bucks) will receive an obsequious note of thanks from me. I will also send out any bug fixes to these people for free.
I hope you like the Mouse Odometer. I’ve worked hard to test for compatibility problems, but I may have missed some. Let me know if you encounter any, and I’ll try to fix them as quickly as possible. The Odometer is quite benign, so any bugs should be pretty easy to exterminate.
