Mouse Mileage Discrepancies

Support Client software
1

Hello,

I was checking out my stats, and I’ve noticed that my mouse mileage is consistently higher when I’m on an iMac compared to Windows laptop. I use the mouse about the same amount, but I seem to get double mileage on the Mac.

Any ideas on why this is?

2

This can have various reasons.

  1. It strongly depends on screen size. If you have for example a small 12" netbook as a Windows PC and a 27" iMac, your “screen estate” on the iMac is at least 4 times larger, so the mouse usually travels wider (the way on the screen is counted, not the way on the table).
  2. The Clients have - as far as I know - a completely different codebase, so they might just interpret the movement of the mouse differently. You can check that if you set it to display meters and then let it rest in one corner of the screen for a few seconds and then rapidly move it once diagonally to the other corner of the screen. If both screens have the same resolution (e.g. 1680x1050), the same amount in meters should have been moved.
  3. The windows client only measures the mouse position once per second. Linux and Mac Clients do that plenty times per second. This MIGHT be bad for you if you are under windows. If you time it correctly, you can move your mouse pointer in a circle and end the movement in the same place it started. If you manage to do that in under a second, whatpulse wouldn’t have noticed the difference. So if you do e.g. a lot of drawing especially with a tablet (quick strokes), not all the movement will be counted.
3

Interesting! Huh. Well… I did a test for the pure sake of curiosity. I moved the mouse around the screen in two different ways:

  1. Slowly, diagonally across the screen. I’d make one sweep across the screen per second. Kinda slow going.
  2. Super-fast circles all around the screen. The cursor’s just flying everywhere.

It’s the slow diagonals that got more distance recorded!

4

[quote=X-Kal]Interesting! Huh. Well… I did a test for the pure sake of curiosity. I moved the mouse around the screen in two different ways:

  1. Slowly, diagonally across the screen. I’d make one sweep across the screen per second. Kinda slow going.
  2. Super-fast circles all around the screen. The cursor’s just flying everywhere.

It’s the slow diagonals that got more distance recorded![/quote]

It’s also a possibility that Windows is also taking the cursor acceleration that Windows provides into account. I’m going to need wasted to be able to give a definitive answer on what is going on however.

~Century0

5

To be honest, mouse distance is borked up between platforms. No OS has a standard way of making mouse data available. This is one of the reasons distance is going away in time.