ScreenTime

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

What is this?

I'm absolutely terrible at tracking my time. I always forget to start the timer. And then I always forget to stop the timer when I switch tasks. However, I think knowing how long I spend on things would be useful. To that end, I'm using the free version of toggl for tracking time, but supplementing it with an automated screencapture system so I can easily review what I was doing on my computer when.

There are several apps available that integrate screenshots with timing software, but I find the creep factor too strong to want to use them. Instead, I wrote a simple shell script to capture screenshots, along with a simple web app for viewing them.

Pull requests & contributions are encouraged.

How to use it?

There are three components, all of which are in this repository:

• capture.sh -- a bash script for capturing screenshots on a periodic basis
• local server -- any simple static server will do
• capture viewer -- a single-page web app for viewing the captured screenshots

Check out the project, create screens, screens/full & screens/thumbs folders inside the project, and run capture.sh in a shell. I just leave it running pretty much all the time. For the capture viewer, any static server will do. The easiest is probably the python one built-in to OSX, which you can run by:

1. entering python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 in a terminal from the screentime folder
2. going to http://localhost:8000 in a browser.

More server suggestions below.

capture.sh

shell script for caturing screenshots periodically

• just a basic sleep loop that runs every five minutes (configurable)
• takes a screenshot using OSX's screencapture program
• copies it into screens/full
• creates a thumbnail-sized version and copies that to screens/thumbs
• after each capture, updates a static list of all the files that can be served to the web app (screens/screens-list.txt)
• auto deletes files older than 20 days (configurable)
• enhancement ideas:
  • auto create image folders on first run
  • start & stop commands
  • collect more data
    • current application
    • current document / site
    • mouse/keyboard activity
  • incorporate some advice from: http://robertmuth.blogspot.com/2012/08/better-bash-scripting-in-15-minutes.html

local server

simple static server to support the capture viewer (below)

• I'm using php, but can be any static server:
• python -m SimpleHTTPServer
• php -S localhost:8000 (PHP 5.4.0)
• http-server for node
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12905426/faster-alternative-to-pythons-simplehttpserver

capture viewer

single-page web gallery for viewing images

• pretty basic at the moment
• enhancement ideas:
  • UI
    • sort with most recent group on top
    • open/close groups
    • group by day
    • add control panel
      • time range slider / pagination (currently only shows most recent 150 images)
      • open/close all
      • sorting options
      • grouping options(?)
    • zoomed view
      • make max size larger
      • prev/next buttons over whole image
      • keyboard navigation
    • badges are hard to notice & not that useful
    • auto refresh with latest screenshots
  • Technical
    • proper build process w/ linting & tests
    • sass
    • clean up architecture a bit

time tracking integration

Not implemented

• Eventually it might be nice to associate groups of images with a (persistent) description & integrate that with time tracking software
• There are loads of such tools out there. I'm currently playing with toggl and it seems to be working fairly well. Not sure there's any need for more integration.
• Some CLI time trackers:
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409926
  • http://brettterpstra.com/projects/doing/
  • http://projecthamster.wordpress.com
  • https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks
  • https://github.com/christiangenco/t_time_tracker
  • now() { echo $(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") - "$@" >> $HOME/.now }
  • https://github.com/larose/utt
  • http://wtime.sourceforge.net/
  • https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster

License

MIT