"wEyes" is a Windows program that, although originally designed purely for amusement, might actually be of use to some computer users. Inspired by the famous "xEyes" program run on many UNIX-based xWindows systems, this program draws two eyes in a window; the eyes then track the movement of the mouse.
I gave this program to a friend of mine who owns a notebook-size computer with an LCD screen. When he ran Microsoft Windows, he often had problems keeping track of the location of his mouse pointer -- LCDs are notoriously slow, and if my friend happened to move the mouse suddenly, he would have to scan the entire LCD screen to locate the pointer. wEyes seems to have helped.
Basically, writing the program was a light exercise in trigonometry. The program checks the position of the mouse pointer on a regular basis, and using slopes, arctangents, sines, and cosines, determines where the "pupils" of the eyes -- which are independent of each other -- should be.
Two of wEyes's features should be noted. First, by default the program checks the mouse position every 100 milliseconds. If you are running several applications, however, you may want to cut this rate down. Hence I have included a command-line option. If you want to specify a particular interval between "mouse checks," include a number between 1 and 99999 as a command-line parameter. (Any number higher than 99999 will be truncated, while any number below 1 is deemed to be 100).
Second, when wEyes is minimized, the eyes continue to follow the pointer. So if you're hurting for screen space, but still want to view the eyes (or your other icons, for that matter), you can do so by minimizing the wEyes window.
No copyright is claimed in this software by its author. No rights related to this software are given by its author. The user agrees to use this software at his or her own risk, and agrees not to hold the author liable for any damages, direct, indirect, consequential or otherwise, in tort, in contract, or upon any other theory of law or equity, regardless of whether such damages are caused by the author's own negligence.
To load wEyes onto your Windows system, first copy WEYES.EXE and WEYES.TXT to the directory of your choice. Next, enter Windows's Program Manager and select a program group. Then select "File," "New," "Program Item" from the menu bar (in that order). In the "Command Line" edit box, type "<Drive>:\<Pathname>\WEYES.EXE nnnnn" (where nnnnn = the interval between "mouse checks," in milliseconds). Choose "OK." When you want to invoke the program, simply double-click the wEyes icon.
This program is written mostly for fun. If you do enjoy it and would like to find out about other products and services provided by OutLook/PC Business System Design, drop us a line at:
