Getting the Waggle On

Development of the Waggle My Mouse application has been going well. I’ve over come a number of issues, I can now track the mouse pointer, and can capture the quick changes in the mouse pointers location. Two outstanding technical issues arise. These are:

  1. How do draw a highlighted shape over the mouse pointer?
  2. How do I know when the mouse has been waggled?

Detecting a Mouse Waggle

I’ve done some Windows programming before and I’ve a fairly good idea that I can draw a shape over the mouse pointer. The biggest unknown after that was trying to determine what a waggle is, and recognising when I saw one. I’ve a little test bed win32 application that I’ve been playing it. I’ve been using this application to complete my investigations on the practical ability I have to write a mouse waggle utility. I modified this test bed tool to record the mouse pointer locations, and the Delta-X; the difference in the position between the X coordinate of the mouse pointer now, and when it was last recorded. I managed to capture a bucket load of data describing what a mouse shake (or waggle) looks like. I imported this data into excel to let me visualise the waggle.

Graph of a Mouse Waggle

The shape of the waggle became really quite easy to see. The next question is “How do I write a bit of code which can detect that waggle?”. - Or at least that’s what I thought the question was.

Sharing the Waggle

I’ve a big fan of Justin Jackson with the Mega Maker podcast and Rob Walling and Mike Taber with the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and I was listening to them recently, when both shows made two really good points:

  1. “How will I let people know about my idea?”

and

  1. “How do I know what people think about my idea?”

That got me thinking.. “I really need to Share my Waggle”. So I bought wagglemymouse.com. Feel free to check it out, there is nothing there right now. My next job is to create some content which concisely describes my idea and why it is a good thing, and encourages people to sign up to an email list, or follow me on twitter for updates. That’s going to be my focus until the next Waggle my Mouse blog post.