An Interesting View of My Day

Yesterday afternoon for a few hours, I ran a java program called IOGraphica. I’ve seen these types of images done before, but never knew how they went about doing it. Download Squad had an article the other day talking about the app. The lines are a trace of my cursor, the dots represent an idle cursor. The bigger the dot, the longer I was idle. For some reason, it also draws a circle around the dot. I’m not sure what determines the size of this circle. I’d love to know. I’d also like to be able to turn this off. It looks like I drew a lot of perfect arcs with my cursor.

I have three monitors:

• • Left: 4:3 landscape – Pidgin, Chrome, taskbar/start menu.
  • Center: 4:3 portrait – Visual Studio
  • Right: 16:10 landscape – Outlook & SSMS.

Given this odd landscape, IOGraphica seems to have done reasonably well at capturing a rectangular image. It chopped off the top 5% or so of my center monitor, but not much goes on there. As you can see, I spend a lot of time on my left monitor. Or rather, my cursor spends a lot of idle time on my left monitor. I’m not sure how this translates to the distribution of my attention, but the tightness in the right side of my neck seems to validate it.

A couple of hours this morning without the dots for an idle cursor:

I think it stopped reading my cursor shortly after an hour though.

As a result of this little experiment, I might swap my monitors around. I think it proves that the ergonomics of my configuration are less than ideal.

I had  couple of problems. I tried twice to capture a full day, but both times IOGraphica would simply quit drawing after a couple of hours. The interface continued to respond. It also has an option to capture an image of your desktop and set it as the background. It will only take a screenshot of my primary monitor and stretch it to fill the entire image.

If anyone has any better luck with it, let me know. And send me yours!