A quick quiz: What is the burning question at the forefront of every Macintosh user’s mind these days? Is it:
A. How can I see the pictures stored in the ROM of my SE?
B. Could anyone ever be as cool as Guy Kawasaki thinks he is?
C. How far has my mouse travelled in the last month?
If you answered C, then you’ve come to the right place (although I’m still looking for a resolution of B myself. For A, just press the interrupt button on the left side of the SE, then type “g 41D89A” and hit Return when the debugger comes up --- but I digress.)
The Mouse Odometer is a toy application that will quietly watch your cursor and record, in miles plus some other interesting units, 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 Apple ones.
The Mouse Odometer requires that you be running System Version 6.0 or greater. It is fully System 7 compatible.
• INSTALLATION •
Just drop the Mouse Odometer INIT (oops! They’re called Extensions now) into your System Folder and reboot the Macintosh. The INIT will quietly accumulate mileage while you work.
If you were running an older version of the Odometer, you can save your old mileage statistics. Go into your System Folder and drag the “Odometer Prefs” file into the Trash. Next, replace the old INIT with the new one. Finally, *before* rebooting to start the new INIT running, run the new Odometer application. When you quit, the new data will be saved to a new preferences file, which will be updated with your old mileage statistics when you reboot by choosing “Restart” or “Shutdown” from the Finder’s “Special” menu. Trust me, it’ll work.
• THE APPLICATION •
To see how far your mouse has gone, run the Mouse Odometer application. A small window will appear with two odometer dials. The top dial shows how far 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.
By default, the distance will be displayed in miles. You can use the “Units” menu to select another scale --- maybe you desperately need to know how far your mouse has travelled in Kilometers or Furlongs, for example. Like a car odometer, the Mouse Odometer dials will “roll over” back to zero if you travel more distance than they can show. Refer to the section below on “Customizing the Units Menu” for information on how you can choose your own scale to display the distance in.
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 and current Units setting 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.
• CUSTOMIZING THE UNITS MENU •
The information that the Mouse Odometer uses to translate mouse movements into distances is stored in the application’s Resource File. If you’d like to add your own scale, perhaps “Frito-Bag Lengths,” you can do so with ResEdit by modifying the UINF resource with ID 0. Be forewarned, though --- you can do a reasonable amount of damage with ResEdit, so proceed with caution.
When you open up the UINF resource, you will see the entries for each unit type. Scroll to the bottom of the list and click once on the last row of asterisks, then choose “Insert New Field(s)” from the “Resource” menu. This will insert a new, blank Unit Type which you can fill in as shown below:
Full Name: The name as it will appear in the “Units” menu of the Odometer Application, e.g. “Miles”.
Abbrev Name: The name as it will appear after the dials in the Application Window, e.g. “mi”.
Conv. Factor: The number of these units in a mile. For example, the entry for inches would be “5280.0”.
Whole Digits & Dec. Digits: The number of whole digits and decimal digits, respectively, that should be when displaying data in this Unit Type. For example, the miles dial has 3 whole digits and 7 decimal digits. NOTE: These two numbers must add up to 10 for the dial to be shown correctly in the Application Window.
• THE NOT-SO FINE PRINT •
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.
Enjoy!
--- Sean
Sean P. Nolan
3849 Klahanie Dr. SE #7-304
Issaquah, WA 98027
seanno@microsoft.com
• CHANGES IN VERSION 1.3 •
For this version I added support for multiple Units settings. I also took out all references to THINK’s ANSI library, and instead use SANE functions directly. This allowed me to put all the code into one small segment, which reduced the amount of memory needed to run the app. Yay!
• CHANGES IN VERSION 1.2 •
My fix in v1.1 seems to have worked for the problem of the disappearing screen. However, when people have more than one screen, and wanted to keep the odometer on a secondary screen, it fell apart --- resetting the odometer window to the primary screen on every startup. This release fixes that problem.
The problem arose because the odometer made sure that the screen appeared within the "screenbits" rect (which encompasses only the primary screen) as opposed to the "GrayRgn" rect (which encompasses the entire bunch of screens). A simple change fixed that problem. I hate having 5 volumes of Inside Mac. :-)
• CHANGES IN VERSION 1.1 •
Well, there aren’t any functional changes. A rather severe bug cropped up in version 1.0, and this version is a fix. My apologies to all who encountered the problem, and my thanks to everyone who helped me track it down with reports and ideas.
A really, really stupid bug caused the Application to crash on certain machines (read: those with FPU’s) if you ran it without installing the INIT. The point at which it crashed was after creating a preferences file, but before writing the default window values. When the app was started up again later, it looked at the (garbage) values that were where the window was supposed to be, and since IT didn’t care that the file said "put the window 4,803 miles away from my screen in Akron, OH" it went ahead and tried to anyways. This was the problem, and it should be fixed now.
Again, thanks to everyone who sent me notes with the problem, and PLEASE continue to send in bug reports if you encounter any. It really helps!
