saramichelef's dashboard

A comment on the question "Not capturing activities when a Keynote presentation is running!" in Slife Labs:

Yup, just adding another data point! If I want to track how much time I'm spending on teaching, I can always mentally add the actual class time, so it's not a HUGE deal for me, but I thought it would be helpful for you guys! – saramichelef, on February 18, 2009 01:23

saramichelef replied on February 10, 2009 16:19 to the question "Not capturing activities when a Keynote presentation is running!" in Slife Labs:

I have investigated further... if you manually set your activity, it WILL capture what you're doing.



Observation rate makes this a little wonky, though - I have mine set to 1 minute to save processor load and so if I don't advance a slide at the very moment it does the observation, it still doesn't capture any activity.

I'm wondering if some solution similar to what's been discussed regarding the watching of videos could be applied...

saramichelef asked a question in Slife Labs on February 10, 2009 15:45:

Not capturing activities when a Keynote presentation is running!

I discovered today that Slife is not capturing any activity when I'm using Keynote in presentation mode! The screenshot below shows what I'm talking about - the time when I was running my presentation

Obviously this will be subject to actual activity and there may be a decent amount of idle time while I run my mouth instead of clicking, but it's COMPLETELY EMPTY for the 45 minutes of my class this morning and I know I changed slides a bunch of times! ;^)

I'm wondering if this is a function of it not properly DETECTING the activity because there's no window with a title bar... in which case maybe the answer is to manually set my activity before I go teach? Still... it would obviously be preferable for it to capture the data automatically.

saramichelef shared an idea in Slife Labs on January 21, 2009 14:18:

UI Improvement I'd love to see...

Currently, when you add URLs/documents to an activity, you're presented with a big unsorted list of every string you've ever associated with an activity. Honestly, I find it pretty annoying to have to scroll through every string I've ever associated with an activity to find the ones I care about.

I can think of three ways to make this cleaner:

1. Side by side lists of existing strings that are and aren't associated with the activity, with arrows to move them back and forth and the ability to add strings that aren't already in one of those lists.


2. Maybe easier? The ability to sort the contents of the Web & Docuements tab by the checkbox, so that the associated strings are easier to find.


3. My dream scenario: For each activity, the Web & Documents tab shows ONLY the strings that are associated with it. When you click on plus to add a string, you can either select from ones that are associated with other activities or add a new one.

I'm not sure how this would dovetail with the popular desire to be able to associate whole folders & filepaths with activities, but I don't think they would be mutually exclusive.

saramichelef started following the idea "Drag Documents to Activities" in Slife Labs.

saramichelef asked a question in Slife Labs on December 19, 2008 21:06:

Retention of manually set Activity?

I'm having a kind of weird and seemingly inconsistent behavior. SOMETIMES when I manually set an activity (by selecting it from the drop-down in the menu bar) Slife retains the activity even after a reboot. Other times, it doesn't. Obviously, this doesn't make the tracking of my activities very accurate! :^)

saramichelef replied on December 14, 2008 17:32 to the problem "Slife uses TONS of processor cycles on Macbook running 10.5.5" in Slife Labs:

Events are being removed every month... I'm sending the sample process via e-mail.

saramichelef gave praise in Slife Labs on December 12, 2008 19:37:

Manuals, whoohoo!

Thanks for getting the Guides up, guys! That's going to be a big help to new users.

saramichelef replied on December 12, 2008 19:35 to the problem "Slife uses TONS of processor cycles on Macbook running 10.5.5" in Slife Labs:

I've been noticing this too, over the past couple of days my machine has been running v. slowly. Quitting Slife sped things up remarkably... Watching my activity monitor, it seems to be spiking to over 80% whenever it does an "observation"... I dropped the observation rate down to 1 minute and that seems to be helping.

Would it be helpful to have sample process data from me?

saramichelef started following the problem "Slife uses TONS of processor cycles on Macbook running 10.5.5" in Slife Labs.

saramichelef replied on December 08, 2008 17:28 to the problem "Web and Documents doesn't work at all" in Slife Labs:

Do you have "Fetch URLs and Additional data from supported applications" checked? It's in the preferences, under "Tracking". Give that a shot and see if it helps.

A comment on the discussion "Slife and Productivity - Share Your Thoughts" in Slife Labs:

Gregor, I use growl (http://growl.info) and it can interact with slife and does notify me when I have reached a goal. It doesn't do the "10 minutes remain" bit which I, too, would love to see. – saramichelef, on December 04, 2008 15:23

saramichelef marked one of WiseCat's replies in Slife Labs as useful. WiseCat replied to the idea "The Goals view isn't much use.".

saramichelef started following the idea "Count different Spaces on Leopard toward Activities in Sllife" in Slife Labs.

saramichelef started following the idea "Giving certain websites they're own representation in Slife" in Slife Labs.

saramichelef replied on September 23, 2008 17:31 to the idea "Giving certain websites they're own representation in Slife" in Slife Labs:

I like this idea, but why not just create activities and goals related to those websites? For example, I have an "Internet procrastination" activity that tracks time on livejournal, facebook, etc., and has a goal associated with it. Ditto for "checking e-mail" which covers my webmail systems and mail.app.

saramichelef replied on September 19, 2008 01:06 to the problem "Slife quits (crashes) on launch" in Slife Labs:

This cropped up for me... sometime earlier today, I think. I upgraded to 10.5.5 yesterday but it definitely worked after that. The only other thing that has changed on my system is that I installed MoodBlast a couple of days ago, but the two coexisted for a couple of days without incident. I have deleted the files listed in the first post above and it didn't change anything.

When I launch slife, it starts up enough to launch the menubar icon, and then I get the MacOS "The application Slife quit unexpectedly" error window.

saramichelef started following the problem "Slife quits (crashes) on launch" in Slife Labs.

A comment on the question "How to track activity times when computer is off?" in Slife Labs:

Well, I'm actually not concerned about tracking my non-computer time so I wouldn't use that functionality anyway. It was just a thought I had. :^D – saramichelef, on August 28, 2008 15:09

saramichelef replied on August 25, 2008 17:00 to the question "How to track activity times when computer is off?" in Slife Labs:

I had a thought about while I was swimming laps this morning. ;^)

How hard would it be to put in an "add time" option for activities - so it wouldn't be a matter of telling Slife "I'm working on this activity" and it continuing to track even after the system hibernates. Instead you would be responsible for watching your own clock and telling Slife how much time you spent on the activity after the fact.

I guess that this starts to incorporate more general time-tracking software ideas, but it seems like there's demand for something that can do both.