Visual Mouse acitivity indicator application for windows?

May 21, 2007 12:50 PM

Visual Mouse indicator? Looking for a windows app that will visually show what is happening with the mouse, i.e., if the button is clicked, or held down, or then if a drag occurs. The purpose is for screen casting tutorials.

I'm doing tutorial screen casts for a CAD program, and instead of constantly saying, OK, now I'm right-click-dragging the mouse to pan the screen... I'd like for there to be a visual that I can record along with the screen casts that shows the activity of the mouse. I'll still mention important activities in the voice-over, I just think it would be another excellent feedback mechanism for the end-user.

posted by killThisKid to Technology (12 answers total)

Response by poster: Let me first apologize for my horrible, horrible spelling mistake. Could a mod save me my pride and fix that?
posted by killThisKid at 12:52 PM on May 21, 2007

Take a look at Camtasia Studio or Wink !
posted by mattdini at 1:01 PM on May 21, 2007

There's also Mouseposé for OS X. Screencasting on a Mac. I'm pretty sure similar functionality is incorporated into Windows/Linux screencasting software, as visualizing mouse clicks is a pretty common request.
posted by chrominance at 1:06 PM on May 21, 2007

Oh, and on post-post, the relevant manual page for Camtasia.
posted by chrominance at 1:12 PM on May 21, 2007

Response by poster: I'm not referring to the 'mouse pointer'. The mouse pointer is captured, that's not the problem. I want something that shows the state of the buttons, the clicks, the drags, etc.

Oh, I've got my production steps all worked out. That's not the issue. I've tried wink. I didn't get the nice fine consistent screen caps I needed from it. Windows Media Encoder performs quite nicely however, and then another fews step including ffmpeg takes the whole think to a nice flv file.
posted by killThisKid at 1:19 PM on May 21, 2007

Thanks for the clarification.

Almost all mice configuration software I've seen has a picture of the mouse, and will light up a part of the mouse when it is clicked, you could force that window to be in front of everything during the video if possible.

I also dug around and found a visual basic 6 project that does the same thing, not 100% perfect, but could easily be modified to suit your needs.

Screenshot
Download Link (to project)
Download EXE (I compiled it for you)
posted by mattdini at 2:03 PM on May 21, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks mattdini, that is definitely the concept I am after. Of course, I'm picky and what I want is a pretty simple 2d overlay, with scrolling fading descriptions of what happened along with the option to show keyboard input, too.. =).

I found a project on codeproject.com that has the code to do the global hooks in c#. I've got my vectored mouse art done, so I guess unless someone presents a link to something better, I guess I'll roll my own...

I'll post back a link when done if anyone is interested.
posted by killThisKid at 2:16 PM on May 21, 2007

Have you tried Captivate? It's geared towards software demos and has lots of features for adding little annotations (such as a little blue dot appearing over the mouse cursor when you left click) to make it clear what and how you're clicking, and so on. I've not personally used it but you should root around for some demo videos and see if it's up to speed.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:16 PM on May 21, 2007

Response by poster: Rhomboid: part of all this is that I'm shooting for an "open source where possible / free when not" production path. The CAD tutorials are just a start on a larger project. One of my set of screencasts will also be on... screencasting! End to end, I'm using:

Windows Media Encoder
ffmpeg
audacity
aviSynth
FLV MetaData Injector
JW's Flash Media Player

And a few other misc items here and there, for an end to end high quality screen cast authoring capabilities for free.
posted by killThisKid at 2:24 PM on May 21, 2007

I'll post back a link when done if anyone is interested

Yes please! Good luck with it.
posted by teleskiving at 2:41 PM on May 21, 2007

Best answer: Ah, I must have read too fast and missed the meta/tooling aspect of what you're doing.

In that case, yeah, I'd say look around for a simple freeware app that shows a visual mouse button status indicator. A google found Spot On the Mouse.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:41 PM on May 21, 2007

Response by poster: That, Rhomboid, is pretty much exactly what I want.

It doesn't work under Vista, however.

I still think I"ll make my own.
posted by killThisKid at 6:21 AM on May 22, 2007