Long ago, I had seen Nat Friedman show off a small Mono app that displayed the amount of time you spent on each application, and updated the chart in real time – so that you could clearly make out how much time you’re spending in the browser and how much time you’re actually spending on work.

I couldn’t locate that app, so I had been wanting to write my own version for a long time and finally got around to doing it today.

It turned out to be easier than I thought. First, I had to figure out how to find out what application has the current focus at any point in time, and I was trying to see if I can do it from Python (using the Win32 extensions, and yes, this hack is Windows-only). After a lot of searching, I finally found out that it boils down to just one line: win32gui.GetWindowText(win32gui.GetForegroundWindow()) and this would fetch the title of the application that the user is using at that moment.

After this, all I had to was record the window title every 5 seconds and increment the time spent for each window, and voila, the data is ready. I was quite satisfied with just a command line output, but Raghu egged me on to create a Flex chart frontend for it as well, and when Harish joined in, the fun really got started. The first problem was how to push the data from Python to Flex, and we use the oldest trick in the book – write it to a file. Next, Flex can read the same file as long as the file is in the same directory as the SWF (i.e. the Flash file) location. Then we parse the text to get back the original data, create a pie chart and point it to this data, and voila we have a beautiful chart:

Now I can finally track what I actually end up doing the whole day, heh. You can download the files if you want to use it as well:

• The Python script called “BigBrother.py”
• The MXML file called “BigBrotherGUI.mxml”
• The compiled SWF file for those who don’t want to go through the hassle of compiling the MXML to SWF.
• Just run/open both BigBrother.py and BigBrotherGUI.swf at the same time and watch the statistics.

And who said meetings aren’t productive

Update:

1. Chris J Andrews made a JavaScript GUI frontend.

2. Theyagarajan modified the Python script to make it work on Linux.

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Posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 8:54 pm.
Filed under categories: Adobe, Flex, Python, Tech, Work.