A request came up in a recent meeting talking about future features for Dasher 360. We want to be able to leave Dasher 360 running in “kiosk mode”, whereby if left unattended for some time it starts to run through some canned activities, showing off some of the tool’s capabilities. The mode should be interruptable: when the mouse moves the mode should stop, allowing the user to continue exploring on their own.
This sounded like a really fun problem to tackle, so I started on it right away. My first avenue of research was around tools that already exist for capturing/playing back mouse activity in web-pages. The kind of thing you might use for automated testing, for instance.
Very early on I realised that browsers don’t have this capability built-in: for lots of very good reasons you can’t control the mouse from within a web-page (e.g. via JavaScript). This is something we take for granted in the desktop world, but it’s just not available in the browser sandbox.
That…