Slife

February 23rd, 2007

Slife is the new awareness browser for the Mac OS X that lets you visualize your computer activities like never before.

Slife is a cool little Mac OS X time browser that tracks the apps you use and lets you get a historical view of your productivity. I’m giving Slife a try whilst I work on some client projects to check that I’m using my time wisely. They have an online service as well called SlifeShare – even though they go to lengths to protect your privacy (not taking an email address from you or a name), I’m not sure I can see the immediate value in uploading all my details to the web. I’m sure this would be a very good tool for creating a Nielsens type rating system for Mac software – taking a cross section of Mac users and their usage habits. It’s not that I necessarily think my data is going to be abused, it’s just I don’t see the value in uploading it at the moment.

The Slife interface is nice, quite clean and features a Menu Extra that allows you to choose which project you are currently working on and then track your usage habits whilst working on a certain project. One thing I don’t see at the moment is some funky visualisation of my data, no graphs/charts/stats that are interesting or pretty to look at, the main view shows little dots to indicate activity for a certain app over time but I can’t help think that there needs to be more than this in order for the app to be really useful.

All in all, well worth trying out.

I have created a TextMate scriptlet to grab the name and path of the current document in TextMate and log it to Slife. TextMate Scriptlet