TimeTracker

TimeTracker Source Code

Screenshot

"Why?", you ask. I wrote this to track how I spend my time. Once a minute, it asks the operating system which application is in front. Then it asks that application the name of its front window. It logs this information on quit, or once each hour to a text file, ~/Documents/activitylog.txt in the following format:

A series of lines, with up to 4 fields separated by tabs. The fields on each line are:

• a count, for example 3 means that for 3 minutes, you were working on the same window.
• a number, which represents the number of seconds since 1970 at the time the last sample of the group was taken.
• the name of the front application
• the name of the front window of the front application

There is a huge missing piece here: something to take this data and display it in a form that will be useful to you. But, I figure, this is a start, and you can use a spreadsheet like Excel, Appleworks, or Apple's Numbers in iWorks for that.

0.5.0 - Still a prototype, but useful.
0.6.0 - activityLog.txt is now created with file stystem metadata, so that other programs know that it has a character encoding of UTF-8.

Xcode 3.1. Apache license.

Compatibility: Macintosh OS X 10.4 or later. Macintosh Intel or PowerPC.

Other Source Code by David Phillip Oster

Page last modified March 16, 2009