Upgrade!

Hi all,

We've just released a new update for ThatsMyMouse. The two main features of this release are;
a) Speed updates. ThatsMyMouse will now load & run faster.
b) Improved work-flow for first time users. The new process is;

1. First time users enter a page and ThatsMyMouse is disabled
2. The TMM icon bounces in the bottom-right corner of the browser
3. They click the icon and a "You can use ThatsMyMouse on this page" dialogue opens
4. They click to enable or disable TMM

There are a couple of benefits to this new process. Firstly we had a lot of people interested in using TMM on their website, however they were turned off due to the large dialogue that would pop-up for every first-time visitors. Secondly it is a more intuitive process for new users to go through. They are immediately familiarised with clicking on the bottom-right icon to perform actions & they won't have their mouse cursor shared until they've specifically accepted it.

Don't forget, using ThatsMyMouse is as simple as adding the following code anywhere on your page;

<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" src="http://files.thatsmymouse.com/app.latest.js">

You can find more information about customising ThatsMyMouse here; http://thatsmymouse.com/?page=Add

Thank you to all everyone who continues to use our service. Let us know what you think of this new upgrade!

Introducing shadows!

We’ve just completed some fairly major upgrades to ThatsMyMouse. Refresh this page if you don’t see the updates active in the application.

After observing the use of TMM on some large sites, we noticed that when there were a significant number of avatars on a page, the display became quite confusing. In an effort to combat that, we’ve now added a couple of new features.


Idle State

When someone doesn’t perform an action on a page for 30 seconds, their avatar will enter an idle state. The idle state has several functions;
1) The avatar will become slightly more transparent and appear below all active avatars
2) The avatar will display a “zzz” sleeping icon
3) The person’s name will appear lower in the list of users on the page


Shadows

All avatars and interface components now feature shadows that drop onto the page below them. This significantly helps to distinguish the avatars from the page content. It also looks really cool :) It works on all supported browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer 6. If you don’t like this effect you can turn the shadows off the settings menu.


As part of this upgrade, we’ve also started to introduce a new rendering technique on the interface called css sprites. This significantly helps to reduce page load time and allows us to use more detailed images in the interface.

If you notice any errors as a result of the upgrade, please let us know in the comments of this blog post. Enjoy.

More updates

We're just finalising a system that will allow you to translate ThatsMyMouse into any language. We'd like to have entries in the system ready for when we launch the translation options. If you would like to spend a few minutes to help us out, I'd love to hear from you even if you don't have time to do a full translation. Please email me at james@thatsmymouse.com.

The entire translation is only 100 lines, with many of those being one or two words. We're particularly looking for people who can translate the application into Japanese, German or Spanish (based on our current user base).

Application Updates

We've been rolling out a series of progressive interface updates to the application to improve compatibility with a whole range of sites over the past couple of days. If you're still noticing formatting errors with the ThatsMyMouse interface, please let us know in the comments of this blog post (please include the site url).

Another review

KillerStartups has just posted a review of ThatsMyMouse (although the formatting seems to be broken in the post). Please vote for us if you're enjoying using the application!

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/ThatsMyMousecom---Mouse-Interaction/

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who has been trying out TMM recently. We've only been live for 21 hours and we've already had over 7000 unique pages that are using using TMM. We've also had some 8,000,000 mouse positions broadcast without our current infrastructure breaking a sweat!

I'll make a post later about how we've setup our hardware on Amazon and how it will be able to scale for the future, since it's really quite interesting (no, really).

Also; thanks for all the feedback so far! Most people seem to love the app. We're listening to your suggestions and will be rolling out modifications quickly. First up will be the ability to customise the language files for TMM so you can translate it into your own language, or just change some of the wording on the app if you don't like our default text.

As always, feedback is most welcome. Don't forget to use our developer group if you're having problems adding TMM to your site.

...2 ...1 ...0

And we're live :)

ThatsMyMouse is currently running on this blog. You might want to also check out;
http://thatsmymouse.com/?page=Demo (Try out an API mashup)
http://thatsmymouse.com/?page=Add (Add ThatsMyMouse to your site)

Let us know what you think!

10... 9... 8...

We're in final countdown mode for launch now. Just putting the finishing touches to our documentation.

While you're waiting, Mashable just posted a great review of the application! Check it out here; http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/thatsmymouse/