Recently active ideas in RescueTime about Mac Data Collector

Since you require desktop-login with your desktop clients, it would be great if instead of typing in my username and password, you supported OAuth so I could simply click and link, get a token, and then not worry about logging in every time I restart.

This would really simplify things!

When I know I'm not trying to be productive, I'll disable logging as I'm sure many people do. However it would be nice to have a visual cue to remind me to turn it back on when I start working again.

Could you add separate menu bar icons to indicate whether RescueTime is logging? Something as simple as the greying out the icon a la AirPort would be enough for me. Thanks!

I use RescueTime on my notebook - both at home and work. In corporate network I have to use proxy, of course at home not.

RescueTime data collector should automatically detect lack of proxy or at least try to send updates using proxy and directly (without proxy), if proxy was not found. That would save me a switching proxy on and off when I'm at work / home.

This looks the the perfect app. It has everything I need, except that it posts the data to the web. I NEED an app like this, but I value my privacy enough not to send the info off into cyber-space. Any chance of creating a version of RescueTime that logs and processes all the data locally? I would be happy to PAY for an app like that.

Also, often I use my computer (laptop) offline, and I still want to be able to log my usage.

I have read the privacy policy, but blind trust is not enough. I really dont need my data going out into cyber space at all.

I would like to recommend a feature. I want to be able to set a tag for a machine and have all data from that machine tagged accordingly. This would help me filter work from personal time.

I use OmniWeb almost exclusively for my day-to-day browsing, and would really like to see support for it added to the mac data collector.

Here's the basic code needed to get the url of the current tab from OmniWeb:

tell application "OmniWeb"
set currentWorkspace to active workspace
set currentBrowser to browser 1 of currentWorkspace
set currentURL to address of currentBrowser
end tell

It occurred to me that all of the "dead time" between when you last do something and when the 2-minute idle timer kicks in could be removed simply by not logging the time between the last keyboard/mouse/window event and the expiration of the idle timer. i.e. keep track of the timestamp for the last event, then when you get to the idle timout, you use that previous timestamp when logging rather than the current time.

Also, 2 minutes seems like a long time... I hardly ever go more than 30 seconds without at least fidgiting with the mouse, even when reading a document. Perhaps that timer could be settable on the preferences/logging/timer settings tab.

I would like to be able to exclude certain websites and programs from being tracked on particular computers.

For instance, at home, I remote-desktop to my work computer, which is also running rescuetime. But rescuetime would track the use of mstsc (the remote desktop software) in addition to my usage on the work computer -- I would like to avoid that double-counting.

And, to be honest, I'd rather not my visits to certain websites be tracked.

I think there should be a title bar button (next to minimize, maximize, close) or right-click menu extension that lets a user tag an application without going through his logs and tagging each application and any multitude of arbitrary websites after the fact (a time consuming and HTTP request-intensive task).

see http://www.baslerdesign.com/matt/resc...

To decrease noise I use a whitelist. I am pretty sure that "non white list activity" in the dashboard is the result of me browsing random blogs. I don't want to ignore that in the report and I don't want to turn off the whitelist because that would increase the noise.

I want to be able to mark the beginning and end of this activity while I'm doing it. I realize this defeats the entire purpose of RescueTime since it monitors me silently but having a large block of time as "non white list activity" is not useful data to me, the user.

Different X windows (X11) apps all show up as just as 'X11' in RescueTime. It'd be nice if they were broken out per app.

Here's a way to get the name of the frontmost X11 app:
/usr/X11/bin/xprop -id `/usr/X11/bin/xprop -root |awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW/ {print $5; exit;}'` WM_CLASS

It'll print something like this:

WM_CLASS(STRING) = "xterm", "XTerm"

or

WM_CLASS(STRING) = "emacs", "Emacs"

Of course, that'll only work if X11 is installed - for lots of users, /usr/X11 might not exist.
Hope this helps!

I get this email weekly:

> We hope your last week has been a productive one! Unfortunately, we don't have
> any app & site usage data for you... So you'll never know for sure!

Surprisingly, this *does* tell me something useful about how I spend my time: I don't use my Mac anymore! It's sitting here next to me, but I just use my Ubuntu boxes now. Mac, good. Ubuntu, enough better.

I know you're working on a Linux port, so I'm not really pushing, just commenting.

Okay, this might be overkill for some people, but I work for a major web player, and we use IM quite extensively. I'd go as far as saying it's the main form of communication.

That means that most people have their IM client running all day long, and are more or less "living" in it. For example, not only do I have my co-workers on my contact list, but also my wife, friends, personal acquaintences etc.

So just having a RT entry saying "Adium" doesn't help me much, as I'm (at this point) can only tag it w/ "communication" or some such, but can't say for sure "work" or "personal".

Is there the possibility to go the "browser way" with this? Taking notes about the contact in addition to the program name?

Thanks for considering,
C.

I don't like having the data collection agent clutter up my running applications list when I Apple-Tab, so it would be great if we had an option to hide it from the dock, Similar to how we have that option in Skitch, Quicksilver, and other menu bar applications.

Take screenshots, say, one in every 15 mins. These would be stored locally (?). One year of 150kb jpegs every 15mins would take about 5GB (without gaps).

Screenshots would help in project tracking. On top of seeing hourly aggregates you would see some actual screens with exact timestamps.

I once used this User Logger software and the screenshots were helpful:
http://chemware.co.nz/usrlog.htm

The following is a super-simple script to toggle logging on and off for the Mac Data Collector. I use it in conjunction with quicksilver to turn logging on and off from any application.
-------

delay 0.3
tell application "RescueTime" to activate
delay 0.3
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "l" using command down