Igor Kromin |   Consultant. Coder. Blogger. Tinkerer. Gamer.

It's been quite some time since I wrote Mouslr, a tool used to create glitch art by tracking mouse movements, clicks and wheel scroll events and translating those to colours, shapes and lines. A sample generated image might look like this...
DayAtWork.dat.jpg


Colours are used as a sort of a heat map to indicate that the mouse cursor was present at that location more frequently. Clicks and mouse presses are shown as ovals, wheel scroll events as squares and moves and drags as lines of varying thickness.

Some of the art produced is quite interesting!
HourOfCoding.dat.jpg

PlayTime.dat.jpg




I was running Mouslr on my Mac (it should also work on Windows and Linux though I've not tried that), which required a couple of settings to be changed to let it run. First, macOS will complain: "Mouslr.jar" can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer. This is easy to fix, simply open Security & Privacy in the System Preferences and click Open Anyway to let Mouslr run.
mouslr_2.png

mouslr_3.png


Now Mouslr will be running so you can go ahead and set a data file to capture to. The name doesn't really matter but I prefer to name the file with a .dat extension.
mouslr_4.png


Once the data file is set, it's possible to either start a new record session into that file or generate an image from the file (you can load a previous data file if you like). It is possible that macOS will complain again about some accessibility features being used, Mouslr needs to be given permissions to 'control the computer', which really means to have access to be able to track the position of the mouse. This setting is also adjusted from Security & Privacy , under the Privacy tab, then Accessibility. Simply tick 'Jar Launcher.app' and you're done!
mouslr_5.png


That's all there is to the whole app. The interface is minimal and so should be easy to use!
mouslr_7.png


Mouslr is a Java application so it will need Java to be installed. The source code to Mouslr is available here: https://github.com/ikromin/mouslr and a ready to go, compiled binary release can be downloaded here - https://github.com/ikromin/mouslr/releases/download/0.1/Mouslr-0.1a-NOJRE.zip.

Enjoy and share your glitch art!

-i

A quick disclaimer...

Although I put in a great effort into researching all the topics I cover, mistakes can happen. Use of any information from my blog posts should be at own risk and I do not hold any liability towards any information misuse or damages caused by following any of my posts.

All content and opinions expressed on this Blog are my own and do not represent the opinions of my employer (Oracle). Use of any information contained in this blog post/article is subject to this disclaimer.
Hi! You can search my blog here ⤵
NOTE: (2022) This Blog is no longer maintained and I will not be answering any emails or comments.

I am now focusing on Atari Gamer.