TrackTime: Review & 10 License Giveaway
Posted by Michael Mistretta on 12/6/07 in Featured, Giveaways, Home & Personal, Organization
One of the things I love about my mac is multitasking. I love being able to work on multiple things at once. However, I find myself getting distracted very easily. Either by something popping up in Twitterrific, or an interesting RSS article. Sometimes I look back at the end of my day and wonder where all my time went. With TrackTime, I don’t need to wonder anymore.
TrackTime gives you a visual representation of everything you did during the day. It tracks all the applications you used, what times you used them, and how long you used them for. But it doesn’t stop there. It actually tracks what music you were listening to when you were doing a certain thing. And if you were browsing the web, it would tell you exactly what websites you went too, and how long you were on each site. But most amazing is the way TrackTime is able to display all of this information.
TrackTime shows you a lot of information in very simple ways. The main view is the Time line view that is much like Garageband, but instead, for your entire day. There is a time bar along the top that tells you what time it was when you used each application, so you can easily go to 9:00AM and see what you did at that time. Then there are different tracks. The three main tracks are Applications, Music, and Websites. The Applications track is your main track, and tracks your changes between multiple applications by color coding them. If you click on one of the segments in this track, it will tell you what application you were using at that time, and how long you used it for. You can easily scrub along the timeline to look through your whole day, and see all the applications you used. On the lower right of the window, there is also a zoom slider that allows you to view more or less of the timeline at once.
The next track is the Music, or more appropriately, the Audio track. This is probably one of the most unique features of TrackTime. It will keep track of all the songs and podcasts you play throughout the day. Actually, anything you play from iTunes will be recorded in this track. But what’s even more cool, is that there is a little pie chart next to each song. This will tell you how much of the song you listened to before you skipped to another song, or stopped the music. Looking at this, can visually tell you what songs you like the best, and enjoy listening to.
The final track is for websites, and is only active when you are in a browser. This track will record all of the websites you visit during the day, and at what time you went to these websites. The websites will be color coded as well, so you can easily see if you are spending your whole day on Youtube or Facebook. The rest of the window provides easy access for you to pause or resume the tracking, as well as just pausing or resuming certain tracks.
Now you have all of this information. So what? What are you going to do with it? TrackTime doesn’t just stop at organizing the information - it actually analyzes it for you. All it takes is a click of the “Show Statistics” button.
The statistics view, allows you to see exactly how much time you spent in a certain application each day. You can see the number of times you switched to the application, and the average duration of each “session”. You can take this data, and sort it by time, or the average duration, to see where all your time is going. Most of my time is in Safari, iChat, MarsEdit, Twitterrific and Newsfire (I’m a little embarrassed about the Twitterrific one). This can help me plan out my days, and aim to spend less time chatting, and more time blogging. The statistics view extends for all your tracks as well. You can also view your Music and Websites, to see which artists you listen to the most, and the amount of their songs you listen to before skipping to another song. Finally, you can view which websites you spend the most time on. I guess this can help you set limits, and manage your time more efficiently.
I can go on and on talking about the features of this application. You can schedule tasks, and set date ranges for statistics. You can set privacy settings, and set Growl notifications. TrackTime is a really powerful app that gives you so much information about everything you are doing. However, it not only gives you the information, but helps you manage your time in projects, and look at your day, and plan it out. My only problem with apps like these, are that they run in the background. I hate having processes run in the background, because I fear that they take up too many CPU cycles and RAM. To put it bluntly, I was blown away by how few resources TrackTime uses to gather all this information. I am using a MacBook Pro, so your results may vary, but I found that TrackTime used only 0.4% of my CPU while I was in an application, and only peaking at to 2% for a second when switching between applications. Is it worth it? I think it is. For all the information it gives you, it has almost no effect on the speed of your computer.
TrackTime is a wonderful application that finally answers the question, “Where has the time gone?”, and helps you to organize yourself to be more productive, and hopefully more efficient as you work on your Mac. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a statistics junky I bet you will really like it.
The guys at Mamooba have very graciously given us 10 licenses of TrackTime to give away. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with suggestions for the developer’s, or features you would like to see in Tracktime. If you can’t handle that we will also except a list of the three applications that you think you use the most on your Mac.
The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Monday, December 11th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Be sure to subscribe to MacApper to not miss any of our regular giveaways.
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