Clearly, compatibility with Mac OS 9.x did not exist. The eyes stubbornly refused to track the mouse pointer (or anything else for that matter). I tried increasing the memory assigned to the program, but that had no effect. Worse still, they did not move! While large and colorful, they simply sat there with a fixed stare, no matter what I did with the mouse pointer. Disappointing! The eyes did not appear on the menu bar at all, but rather in a new and dedicated window on the desktop.
This sounded compatible enough with my machine and so I gave it a whirl. It declared itself to be from Jades End Software, 1996, and further pronounced itself to be compatible with System 7.5.1 and up and Power Macintosh. I tested them all and this post reflects my findings.Įyes^3 was my first candidate.
I was surprised to find not just one such program, but in fact THREE such programs: Eyes, MyEyes and Watcher. I decided a while ago to try to find such a program, and install it on my Power Macintosh 7300/200, just for the fun of it. And as you might also guess, my menu bar was never without a pair of observant eyeballs, keeping a constant watch on whatever I was doing. Making them go cross-eyed by putting the mouse pointer right underneath them was always a great diversion when things got too serious and I needed a smile!Īs you may guess, there was absolutely zero practical value in such programs, and perhaps because of that they appealed to my sense of the absurd. Rather the eyeballs within them moved around to track the location of the mouse pointer, no matter where you put it. The eyes themselves did not move of course. These programs would place a pair of eyeballs on screen, which would do nothing more constructive than “keep an eye on the mouse pointer” wherever it went. However, without a doubt, my favorite piece of Macintosh silliness of the day was the eyeball programs. Homer had numerous other amusing and predictably unpredictable behaviors, all of which kept him a permanent fixture on my desktop.
If you put the mouse pointer on him, he would churlishly exclaim “Don’t point that thing at me!”. For example, I had a program called Homer Pro, which simply drew a Homer Simpson character on the screen. One of the things I always loved about Macintosh computers, back in the mid 1990’s when I was using them at work as my day-to-day computer, was the amount of simple light-hearted fun that was available for the platform.
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