Onlife - An application usage and tracking tool
Sep 08, '06 11:59:01AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 7 out of 10]
This is the Pick of the Week for the week of August 21st
This week's selection is a bit odd, as it's something that I don't actually use regularly. However, I find the concept quite interesting, and keep coming back to it on occasion, so I thought it worth sharing. Onlife is a bit tricky to describe, so I'm going to borrow the description from the program's homepage: "Onlife is an application for the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more." Basically, Onlife watches what happens in a number of different applications, logs that activity, and then indexes it. You can also tag activities, as well as place them into one or more groups. Your activity in each app can then be viewed in one of six modes (day, week, month, table, thumbnail (for web pages), and summary.
For different apps, different things are tracked. iTunes songs played, Camino, Firefox and Safari web pages visited, Mail messages received, Word and TextEdit documents, QuickTime movies, etc. Every time you do something in one of these apps, an entry is created in Onlife. Over time, your usage patterns become clear, and it's also simple to go back in time to find something you worked on in the past, whether that be an hour ago, a month ago, or more. You can view an info screen for stored data, or actually view the web page, listen to the song, read the email, etc.
The list of supported apps isn't overly extensive -- 17 as of the latest beta. But there's a good selection of "baseline" apps that many users are likely to use (Mail, Safari, Camino, Firefox, TextEdit, Word, NetNewsWire, and QuickTime, among others). There is a price to pay when Onlife is running: it will use some CPU cycles (and RAM, obviously) as it sits there in the background, watching and recording the activity in the apps you use. On my Dual G5, this was usually in the 3% to 7% range, spiking upwards of 20% depending on what was happening.
As for exactly what Onlife might be used for in the long run, that's one of the reasons this is an interesting pick: I'm not really sure. I find the visualizations of usage kind of neat, as it shows which apps are getting the majority of my time throughout the day. I've also used it to quickly find, for instance, an email that I know came in a day or so ago, but has long since been filed in my monstrous maze of Mail folders. But mostly, it's a pick just because I find it an interesting concept ... and since it's free, it doesn't cost anything to take a look.
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