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can time typing or mouse movement be used to configure when an app is recording time?
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Right now Slife uses mouse movement as one of the parameters to decide whether you are "active" or "idle". If you are "active", then Slife goes to work and tracks your activities, outputting events in the process. If not, then it assumes you went to grab some coffee and stops recording activities.
So I think the answer to your question is "yes"!
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Inappropriate?Right now Slife uses mouse movement as one of the parameters to decide whether you are "active" or "idle". If you are "active", then Slife goes to work and tracks your activities, outputting events in the process. If not, then it assumes you went to grab some coffee and stops recording activities.
So I think the answer to your question is "yes"!
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Not entirely correct. The answer in German would be "Jein" - meaning YES AND NO. Yes, mouse activity will be registerd and NO, SLife cannot / won't register keyboard usage, even though typing is usually much more certain to be work related activity than just moving the mouse, at least in certain professions.
I could be made optional to choose if one wants to have typing ignored, but generally I don't see why one would do that.
What are the developers thoughts on this issue? Is this by design? Is it a technical issue? And will it be changed / fixed in future versions?
I’m hoping this gets fixed soon.
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Inappropriate?I think it would be a very good idea to count typing as an activity, and I'm a bit concerned that it isn't counted as one....
Yes, I use my mouse a LOT, but when I'm doing certain things, the mouse generally sits, untouched, while I type. I'm having a hard time understanding why "typing" time would ever be considered "idle" time....
ANY input should be a clue that the user is not idle....
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?When Slife was originally created, we decided that detecting mouse movement was enough to detect activity. The thinking was that even if you are typing or engaged in word processing, every 2-3 minutes you would at least 'touch' the mouse.
The other reason for not tracking keys was that lots of spyware apps do that and we wanted to be as far away from these evil apps as possible.
Having said all this, there's no reason why we can't go back and look into it again. We are not claiming that typing is not an "activity". It certainly is, and if we need to track it more precisely so that Slife does its job, we will do it.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?You guys seem to be really on the ball!
I don't think you have to worry about being associated with "evil apps" just because you have one trait in common. Anyone who tries out Slife ought to see the value in it and not be confused. : )
I was mostly thinking about the previous poster's issue, and people like my husband who use a LOT of keyboard shortcuts. (If he had his way, he'd almost never touch the mouse!)
Thanks for the quick response! : )
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Well, you wouldn't have to "track" the keyboard, just detect keyboard usage. I don't know how other apps do it, but you might take a look at AntiRSI and Active Timer. Both are very simple apps, but they always know whether I'm working or not.
My concern with setting a longer idleness detection period is that it would also result in an uncorrect time count. I use Time Out (after having used AntiRSI for a long time) to remember taking work breaks. Breaks should be deducted from my work time...
Anyway, great to hear that you're working on this issue.
I’m hopeful.
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Inappropriate?Great! Thanks, yes, keyboard usage would be enough. Should be easy enough for us to support. I am curious to see if that makes a big difference myself.
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Inappropriate?I think it would make a huge difference! I was chatting on IM, an application where once I've opened the window I may not touch the mouse for several minutes because all I need to do is read, type my response and hit "enter" to send, and then read, and type my response, etc. So while the chat log shows I was on for over an hour, slife only recorded 24 mins of chatting. While this is probably great for making me feel good, it's not great at making me stop chatting earlier! So please add in keyboard activity soon!
I’m hoping this gets fixed soon.
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Inappropriate?My definition of an active application is the application that owns the front-most window. I am "active" when there is no mouse movement or keyboard activity at all. Compare Slife with TimeSlice's application/document tracking. TimeSlice is better at tracking what's actually happening (and still allows an "idle" to be defined). Incidentally, TimeSlice provides information about a document's full path -- not just what appears in the window title. Since the projects I work on can share identical "window names", Slife doesn't let me track ~/projecta/public/index.html differently than ~/projectb/public/index.html
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Inappropriate?Any word on if/when y'all might incorporate keyboard usage="not idle"???
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?We just released a new version of Slife yesterday. You can check it out on our site. The new version is able to detect keyboard activity.
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