Are there any plans to show mouse clicks?

Hello Steffen,

Yes, I think include this features in the next releases. But, for the moment, I don't know how should display mouse clicks, maybe as a "Click1" word. If you have other ideas would be welcome.

Thanks,

Hi Pablo,

the coolest thing would be to see the click directly at the mouse position like the Show Mouse plugin in Compiz but whenever the button is clicked. An alternative could be to use special symbols for left-/right- and middle-mouse klicks in the screenkey display.

Best regards,
Steffen

Mouse actions should be highlighted with some kind of effect, like commercial screencast tools do it (e.g. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/assets/videos/7/tour/cursor-effect.asp - I would vote for the ripple effect ;). I don't see much point in displaying some text for a mouse action. If effects seem to hard to add, display a graphic to indicate what button has been clicked, to differentiate mouse clicks from key presses.

Maybe such effects would be beyond the scope of this project, given its name, and we need a separate project that visualizes mouse actions, but I rather think that both aspects are related enough to warrant only one tool. And eventually the whole thing could grow into a real screencasting tool, who knows?

The following blog spots shows some ideas:
http://whyareyoureadingthisurl.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/introducing-a-screencaster-called-kazam/

I've just learned that Kazam is actually a real project. Maybe you two might want to get together and integrate screenkey into Kazam, see https://launchpad.net/kazam

Hey Marco, thanks for the links. :)

I am the developer of Pongo, a small script for picture-in-picture-recording of screen and webcam. I’m currently trying to get hold of the developers of all the different utilities useful for screencasting / usability testing to have one installable package.

If you know more tools please let me know. You can check out Pongo at http://launchpad.net/pongo

Hi Jan-Christoph, thanks for stepping in. The focus of Pongo seems to more towards usability testing. I'm currently only interested in screencast tools to show of some software. It's key to get a high quality recording of screen activities and only ffmpeg does currently seem to fit the bill. But this is probably off-topic ;)

Regarding screenkey, I've found a similar tool that does display graphics for mouse activity and also provides a (basic) mouse click visualization feature. Might be great to get some inspiration, though I would really prefer to have an animated effect similar to the commercial Windows and Mac tools. I should really learn the API's and give it myself a try.

Anyway, the app is called Keyboard Status Monitor (key-mon) and hosted on Google, http://code.google.com/p/key-mon/

Hi,

just some ideas:

- If compiz and it’s Dbus plugin is active, effects like Show Mouse can be triggered by any application via dbus (see http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Dbus).

- GNOME itself has a feature under Settings – Mouse to show the mouse position by pressing the Control-Key. May be this could be used as a workaround or you could make use of the graphical effect that is used to show the mouse position.

Cheers,
Steffen