Pointer Seismograph per h74611264

Pointer Seismograph is a privacy-minimized interaction observatory for designers, developers, researchers, and individuals studying their own pointer behavior. It records one explicitly activated top-level tab and develops the motion into a local field plate without taking screenshots or retaining page identity.

During recording, a fixed visible badge states that Pointer Seismograph is active. Pointer positions are sampled at a bounded rate and quantized to two-pixel increments. Clicks record time, position, mouse button, a generic target category, and target dimensions rounded to four pixels. Scroll events record only timing and delta. Optional user-authored moment labels can mark events such as beginning a task or reviewing a result.

The recorder deliberately refuses page text, URLs, screenshots, DOM selectors, element IDs, form values, keystrokes, clipboard data, network traffic, and page source. It never enters subframes. A session is capped at 6,000 movement samples, 600 clicks, and 1,000 scroll events to keep state bounded.

Stopping the recorder returns the session to the extension popup, where at most four recent plates are kept in localStorage. The Observatory can also load two deterministic sample plates without visiting a webpage.

The Path Seismogram colors segments by movement speed and marks clicks without reproducing the underlying page. Attention Density bins normalized samples into a 20 × 12 heat field. Hesitation view identifies locally confined pauses, return visits, and click clusters. Additional analysis reports distance, mean and peak speed, pause ratio, direction reversals, unresolved travel between terminal actions, scroll coupling, generic Fitts click measurements, and rage-click-like local clusters.

Any two retained plates can be compared by normalized duration, distance, pause ratio, reversal count, click count, and cluster count. Replay animates only the canvas trace and time readout; it does not rebuild the surrounding report. JSON export includes the minimized session and derived analysis. SVG export creates a self-contained content-free field plate.

Included capabilities:
• explicit single-tab recording with a persistent visible badge;
• bounded and quantized pointer sampling;
• generic click-target classification without text or selectors;
• scroll delta and user-authored moment markers;
• path, speed, density, hesitation, return, and click-cluster analysis;
• Fitts measurements using generic target dimensions;
• two-plate normalized comparison;
• canvas replay without per-frame DOM reconstruction;
• local retention limited to four recent sessions;
• JSON and self-contained SVG export;
• two deterministic demonstration plates.

Pointer Seismograph is intended for user-controlled observation and should not be used to monitor another person without their knowledge and consent.