MouseTracking
Latest
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me adjust my mouse tracking on the fly
Dear Aunt TUAW, I'm happily running Lion on my computer now, but I've noticed an issue with the mouse tracking speed that is driving me batty. I use a dual-screen setup with my 13" Macbook Air and a 23" Apple Cinema Display (with a Magic Mouse), and the tracking speed doesn't remain constant across the two screens. Adjusting for a normal tracking speed on the Cinema Display results in painfully slow mouse movement on the MBA -- almost as if the proportional movement (relative to the screen size) is calibrated to remain the same. Is this an early Lion bug, or is this a new "feature" that I can somehow unwind? Please help! Your loving, but annoyed, nephew, Nate Dear Nate, Auntie doesn't have good news for you. And that's because the mouse speed option cannot be set on a per-monitor basis. Mouse tracking is controlled as part of system defaults, in the Universal Access preferences pane. The actual preference is called mouseDriverMaxSpeed and can range as an integer between 1 (lethargic) and 32 (zippy). Here's how you'd read the current setting from the command line. defaults read com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriverMaxSpeed Whatever number you set to feel right on one monitor will either feel draggy or hyper on the other. Unfortunately, the problem with auto-scaling the mouse lies in detecting when the cursor has changed between screens. There's no system notification generated so nothing for Auntie to build a tool on, to update the defaults as you move the cursor around. So, Auntie thought she'd throw this one out to all her other nephews and nieces. Have any of you found a solution for Nate that doesn't hinge on system notifications? Hugs, Auntie T.
Google pointer activity monitoring could influence search engine results, probably won't
For the latest development in Google's mad quest for search engine efficacy, the company was granted a patent titled, in the necessarily wordy way that these things are, "System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring." Essentially, the idea here is that mouse pointer movements can be interpreted to gauge someone's interest, so Google would track the mouse as it moves in and out of predefined regions of a web page, or hovers over certain regions for a predefined period of time. Apparently, the pointer is sort of seen as a surrogate for the eye, telling the search engine provider where your eye is wandering. Of course, there is plenty of math on the back end, where the relevancy of those actions has to be determined. Or something. This baby was filed in 2005, and as far as we know this technology hasn't been implemented, so who knows if it ever will? Check it out for yourself by hitting the source link.
