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Comment by jaxn | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from http://rescuetime.com (other than only tracking the text editor)?

Good question. WakaTi.me knows what project your working under while rescuetime.com only knows that your inside your text editor.

That makes sense.

RescueTime gives me information about how much time I spent in each file and is showing me the project as part of that info, but it doesn't rollup time spent in a project.

Still seems of limited use since it wouldn't show me time spent debugging in a browser, working in the database, etc. From a productivity standpoint RescueTime lets me dictate that http://myproject.dev is "debugging" time, Sublime Text is "IDE" time and that Terminal is also "development" time. If I could change how Sublime Text displays info in the title bar then I could probably set it to know that "Sublime Text -> My Project -> file" was time spent in "development/my project".

Actually, RescueTime does know and report on what file / project you have open inside the text editor, as long as the info is in the window title (which both these apps do). And it's keyword-searchable by whatever is in that data point-- usually filename, project name, directory tree etc. It works this way with just about all text editors.

The key word search method is how people usually accomplish the idea of project reporting-- but is admittedly not perfect, like you could get if we actually could consume that meta data.

However, the "document" level details are only exposed to you in the premium version-- in the free version you just get an open document count, so that is a significant difference.

I've always thought the long term path for an enriched time measurement experience would involve plugins like this one. Great to see someone working on it.

Disclosure: I'm a RescueTime employee.

Ah, I am a premium member, so that makes sense that I saw that in my dashboard.

"other than only tracking the text editor" is the key part there.

It's interested in the files and projects you're working in, I think, so it's a bit more specific to programming.

http://www.timecamp.com can automatically capture time based on keywords in window titles, very similar

Or http://timingapp.com which does track what files you work on, and can be grouped into projects?

I bought timingapp and had high hopes for it, but immediately ran into various issues. First and foremost, it wouldn't let you edit the names of activities or the duration spent on any of them. You could enter a duration, but if there was a typo (like entering 12 hours instead of 12 mins), then too bad. I contacted support, but they said the features to edit...well, anything, were not currently available.

That stuff I could forgive since it's a new app, but my major issue was actually more insidious. It uses a background applescript to track your apps and your activity in each and I think it might either contain or inadvertently be causing a memory leak. I keep a memory tracker in my status bar and so I'm fairly in tune with how much memory I have on average. Within a day or two of installing the app, I noticed my memory usage going from ~50% to ~95% usage with the difference sitting in "inactive memory."

I had not changed any other major configs, started using a different set of apps, or installed any other apps since installing TimingApp, so I was very suspicious of it. Still, I gave it the benefit of the doubt and restarted my machine. I worked for another few days and my memory would just casually creep back up to ~95% and stay there until a "purge" command or another restart.

I uninstalled, restarted, and all my memory issues have since disappeared.

Interesting. I'm testing it now, so I'll keep an eye out for that, thanks. So far I'm not seeing anything odd though.

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