Inquisitive as a herd of kittens, shrewd as Columbo, smooth as the Pink Panther, I solve crimes! Wait a sec, that was a different former life. I watch your mouse.
Some of our software is made available free, including our illumineX ScreenSaver PaX. If you like our software, let us know by buying us a cup of coffee!
I am… EyeSpy Guy! I watch your mouse.
There are those who claim that I, EyeSpy Guy, am a cartoon character created in the shadowy distant fog of coram plaga (Times Before Plague), when people, it is said, sometimes gathered in coffee shops to work on creative collaborations.
illumineX CEO Gary W. Longsine and Montana author and graphic artist Ednor Theirrault of Missoula, Montana confess to being among several un-indicted co-conspirators on the EyeSpy project, holding many secret meetings spanning over a year. Great software, like good food and the rare true conspiracy, takes time.
Then one day, she walked into the coffee shop.
That’s a story for another day, from the naked city that never sleeps.
I’m Good At What I Do
I watch your mouse.
I can introduce you to Squeaky, the balloon, who can float around your desktop, watching your mouse.
Like the masks of Mission Impossible and Scooby Doo, I have many cartoon faces, including Barnyard Babies, Citron Spies, and the queen BeeOncé with a flock of baby bees hovering about her.
Check out the ArtPaX available via in-app purchase including a few free downloads.
I can call up my friends, Chirpy, and Smiley, and the gang — dozens of other cartoon characters who can watch your mouse, too.
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. When you look away, even for a second, your mouse can go missing.
I have a particular set of skills. Skills that I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for missing mice. I will look for that mouse. I will find that mouse. I will stare, at that mouse. Your mouse can run, but it cannot hide.
REINCARNATIONS: The Many Past Lives of EyeSpy Guy
Mousewatcher at NeWS
(1986 – 1989)
In most of my past lives, including my first incarnation, I was disembodied eyes, with sclera and pupil, but no iris. Created by William T. Roberts for the NeWS platform, at Queen Mary College (University of London) in late 1986. I died unceremoniously at the age of 27 months, when a sysadmin working late one night cleaned up some space on a filesystem to make room for a class project — a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter.
Assistant Mousewatcher at NeWS
(1988 – ?)
I was conjured in a public ritual by Jeremy Huxtable for the NeWS windowing system at SIGGRAPH ’88 — this was the first well-known version of the cartoon eyes concept. Unlike the Highlander, I spawn anew, each time a new computing platform is born. I can never really die, again.
Mousewatcher at Xeyes
(1993 – Present Day)
Spawned in the early 1990s for the X-Windows system by Keith Packard for the MIT X Consortium, Xeyes is probably the best-known implementation. I remained a simple pair of cartoon eyes, keeping faithful watch over mouse cursors the world over, with no adornment, circles to define my eyeball, and a smaller black circle to define my pupil. [Editor’s note: Here’s a nice UNIX man(ual) page for Xeyes.]
Principle Open Source Mousewatcher at tuXeyes
(2017 – 2019)
Created in the early 1990s
Director of Mousewatching at Eyecon.app (NeXTSTEP)
(2017 – 2019)
I was respawned yet again, this time for the NeXTSTEP/OpenStep system, by Roger Rosner in 1989, a nostalgic implementation offering simple cartoon eyes, as purist nod to the original concept. At the time of this writing (February 2017) Roger’s Eyecon.app was still available for download , in case you happen to have a NeXT Cube or NeXTStation Color Turbo around, somewhere.
Grand Wizard Mousewatcher at EyeSpy
(1999 – Present)
Respawned again, this time by Don Yacktman of MiscKit fame (it was the world’s first free, open source object kit) for NeXTSTEP, and inspired by tuXeyes, my EyeSpy incarnation also featured cartoon characters from OS mascots.
Today’s version of EyeSpy is a brand new implementation written in Apple’s Swift programming language by Alex Cone and Arlan Titchbourne with contributions by several others.
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