Viewing the Mouse Tracks You Leave Behind

Viewing the Mouse Tracks You Leave Behind

Nick Bilton Tracking the mouse movements on my computer for 30 minutes.

If you’ve ever wondered about the flow of your mouse around your computer screen, a free downloadable application, called “mouse pointer track,” can help you follow these esoteric movements and turn them into a fascinating blur between art and information.

The  simple application was developed by Anatoly Zenkov, a Russian graphic designer and programmer, and has been downloaded tens of thousands of times since he first released it in late January this year.

The software runs on any Macintosh or Windows computer and tracks every movement and click of your mouse.

Mr. Zenkov explained in an interview that the project began as a simple attempt to create something visually interesting with computer code. “It was just for fun,” Mr. Zenkov said. “It was meant to be an experiment for me, and then I saw the interest from so many other people, so I decided to share it for free on the Internet.”

As you can see from the images on Mr. Zenkov’s Flickr page, he has been tracking different mouse movements in different application settings.

The images at the top and bottom of this post were made by tracking my mouse movements for 30 minutes, during which time I was writing this blog post and surfing the Web.