My Mouse Path for March 1, 2010

I have decided to run IOGraph all day while I work. These are the results. I wanted to  take a few minutes to run down some of the notes, and some of the initial observations from this experiment.

Notes

First of all, I run the app, only on the days I am in the office, but all day, everyday while I’m there. It’s the first thing I start in the morning, and the last thing I stop before I pack up for the day. I never pause the recording, not even for lunch. I run two monitors at work, a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display running at 1920 x 1200 and a Wacom Cintiq 20-inch tablet monitor combination running at 1680 x 1050. I hardly use the Apple display, so I have chosen not to record my findings for that monitor. (I tried recording it the first day, but ended up with only 8-10 thin lines in the final image. I thought that might be a little boring compared to the vast array of spirals and circles of the other images.) Finally, I typically have the app running somewhere around 7.5 to 9 hours.

Observations

I know it’s still early (I have only collected 8 images so far), but I am already starting to see some trends. I am right handed, and seeing as I am using a pen tablet, you can see how I heavily favour the right side of the display. Looking through the current 8 images, you can also start to see my OS X Dock start to take shape along the bottom of the screen. The New and Delete layer buttons in the Layers panel in Photoshop (CS4) also seem to get lots of love, as does the Selection tool. It is also fun to see, although not nearly as apparent, the approximate placement of windows like my web browser and email client based on my heavy use of their scroll bars.

Just some thoughts. I plan to keep track for a while, so I will hopefully update this posting periodically. Let me know what you think…