TrackTime 1.17

Did you ever like to know, how much time you spend with your Mac? How many hours you listened to your favorite music or surfed the web today, this week, last month? TrackTime has the answers.

You can view your activities on a beautiful timeline for every day or quickly see what matters to you in the statistics for applications, music, websites and your own projects.

Getting started

The best way to get started with TrackTime is to give it a little time – basically, that's what it's about. Let it sit in your menubar for a while, do your usual stuff, surf the web and listen to your music, while TrackTime fills its database. When you want to look at what you've done, click the TrackTime icon in the menubar and choose "Show TrackTime".

From the main window, you can choose different views of your usage. The Timeline view shows all activities of one day in a visual manner. At the bottom of the view, there are controls to zoom in and out and to change the day you are viewing. If you lost track in the past, you can quickly jump to the the present using the "Jump to now" button. You can select individual items in the timeline by clicking on them. On the top of the view, there are controls to delete the currently selected item, to play the selected song in iTunes and to visit the selected website item in your browser. If you want to know more details about an item, click "Show Statistics" to show the item in a table view with more details.

The Details

If you choose "Applications", "Music" or "Websites" in the source selection, you are presented with detailed statistics on each of these categories. Depending on the category you chose, there are different values you can examine. But each of these statistics share certain characteristics: They are all organized in a hierarchical way, where the top level item represents the sum or the average of the lower level items. An artist for example contains various tracks and these tracks contain individual times when this track was played in iTunes. The duration for the artist is the sum of all tracks and the duration of each track is the sum of the times you played that track.

Furthermore, each top level item has an individual color to easily identify songs of the same artist and websites on the same domain in the Timeline. You can change the color of each item easily by selecting it and choosing a different one with the color well at the top of the table.

Applications: All applications you used are listed and you can expand each item to see every session of the selected application. The time in the first column shows the total time you used this application and you can also see, how long an average session was in the "Avg. duration" column.

Music: The first column displays the actual duration you played that item, the "Duration" column shows the complete duration of a track. So if you have a song that is eight minutes, but you only play the first four and then skip it, "08:00" is displayed in "Duration", but "04:00" is displayed in the first column. Note that this is different from iTunes which only counts songs that are played completely. The "Ratio" column shows the percentage you played of this item. In the example it would be 50%.

"Last Rated" shows you the date you last changed the rating of that song or artist. It can be useful to find songs that you added long time ago to library but discovered only recently. Note that this value is only updated when you actually play a song.

Websites: The websites are organized by host. So your search queries are for example listed under "google.com" To easily identify different websites, the FavIcon of the respective websites is also displayed. The "Date" column shows the time you last visited this website.

Date Range

One of the things TrackTime can show you that iTunes can't is "air time" of a specific artist or song within a given time frame. Use the "Date Range" toolbar item to open up a sheet where you can select two dates that define a range. After you clicked "Update statistics", all statistics displayed in the tables will reflect this date range. So you can for example examine your personal music charts for last month or see, which applications you used most in the last week. Please note that if you select a date range in the past, it may appear that no new items are recorded – they are only hidden. When you select a date range which includes the present, you will see them.

Projects

To track activities that are not associated with a specific applications, you can use projects. Each project can represent a group of activities that you'd like to keep track of, for example "My Doctor thesis" or "Work For Customer XYZ"… To add a new project that will be displayed in the source list, click on the "+" button at the bottom of the window (click "-" to delete the currently selected project). You can choose an icon and a color to easily identify this project, name it and optionally save a short description of its purpose.

You can also specify, whether the project should be paused, if you go away from your Mac for a specified time (see Preferences). You can set this option to track activities that are directly connected with work on the Mac. "Doing the dishes" would be an example, where you might not want to pause the project when the screensaver is on.

The easiest way to start and stop activities is using the menu that pops up when you click the TrackTime icon in the menubar. Active projects are marked with a ? in front of them. Click them to stop or click inactive projects to start them. The comment field will be empty when you start a project this way, but you can edit this later, so you don't have to interrupt your work to log a project.

You can also automate this process by using AppleScript. This way you can trigger projects to be started from within other applications such as iCal. Simply use a script like

tell application "TrackTime" to start project "Meeting"
with comment "Meeting with Fred..."

to start a project and

tell application "TrackTime" to finish project
"Meeting"

to stop it again.

Privacy

Sometimes you might not want to log every website you visit or every song you listen to. This is what the "Private Mode" in Safari is for and TrackTime has a similar function, so that you can turn off application, music or web logging individually or altogether, using the toolbar or the status menu. You can also easily delete any item you don't like to see in your statistics (if you want to betray yourself ;)

Note that "Pause All" does not affect your projects.

If you want to make a backup copy of your TrackTime data, please look in ~/Library/Application Support/TrackTime for a file named "TrackTime.xml". This is where all the collected information is stored.

Questions?

This guide should have given you a good overview of TrackTime's possibilities. Should you have any additional questions,feel free to use the mamooba contact form. More informatioin and updates are also available on the TrackTime website.

Registration

TrackTime is shareware. That means, if you'd like to use it for longer than 14 days you'll have to purchase a license. After 14 days of usage, the logging of applications, music and websites will be disabled until you register. You can however still view the data you collected in the trial version.

Purchasing a license is easy. Just visit the mamooba Store and follow the instructions there.