How it came together
A quieter kind of presence
Remote work flattened presence into a series of video calls and status dots. PointerPals is a quieter experiment: what if you could just see where your collaborators’ cursors were, right on your screen, without any meeting or notification?
The app renders remote cursors as a transparent, always-on-top overlay. They show up labeled with a name, move in real time at 30 frames per second, and fade after five seconds of inactivity. They don’t block anything. They don’t ask for attention. They’re just there, a peripheral signal that someone else is working too.
How it works
The architecture uses normalized coordinates so cursor positions translate correctly across different screen sizes. A WebSocket server running on Google Cloud handles the pub/sub layer. The macOS client is Swift and SwiftUI; a Windows client exists in C# and WPF for cross-platform pairs.
The website demonstrates the idea without any installation: two animated cursors trace paths across the page, showing exactly what the experience feels like before you download anything.
Working with AI Draft
[What you asked for, what it got wrong, what you kept. Quote a prompt.]
assets/media/pointerpals/process-1.webpThe name
The name came easily. They follow you around. They’re your pals.