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reptc  
#1 Posted : Monday, September 16, 2013 8:05:01 PM(UTC)
reptc

Rank: Newbie

Joined: 9/16/2013(UTC)
Posts: 3

First, Sorry for my poor English :(

1. Set mininum active time for tracking
Currently, ManicTime tracks usage when applications/documents are active 5 secs or more, but from my experience, tracking under 30 secs usage is pretty useless. 5~30 secs usage log takes up about 80~85% of all tracking, but most of them are not valuable to log, and make timeline very dirty and harder to read. Each people would find how long they paid attention are worth to track, so I would like to see an option to set that value.

2. Ignore list
According to my ManicTime database, the most used application is Windows Explorer, but that is simply not true. I use third party file management tool, so actual time I use Explore is probably less than 1 minutes each day. Regardless of that, ManicTime tracks Explore when I minimized all the programs and away, or my family member use PC with their accounts.
And while it's nice that ManicTime tracks documents of several applications, some of them are not valueable, or tracked on their own so it's unnecessary ManicTime to track that.

3. On/off gradation of timeline
I think timeline would look nicer and clean without gradation. It's nitpicking, I know.

4. Detect non-KB/M input
I used to have trouble with ManicTime to track my gaming hours since ManicTime do not recognize gaming controller input and mark it as 'Away'. As 'Treat sound as Active' option has been added, I can say the issue has been mostly fixed, but I think adding fundamental solution would be nicer.

Edited by user Tuesday, September 17, 2013 3:37:34 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

jxt  
#2 Posted : Monday, September 16, 2013 9:27:51 PM(UTC)
jxt

Rank: Advanced Member

Joined: 9/27/2011(UTC)
Posts: 89
Location: sf

Originally Posted by: reptc Go to Quoted Post
First, Sorry for my poor English :(

1. Set mininum active time for tracking
Currently, ManicTime tracks usage when applications/documents are active 5 secs or more, but from my experience, tracking under 30 secs usage is pretty useless. 5~30 secs usage log takes up about 80~85% of all tracking, but most of them are not valuable to log, and make timeline very dirty and harder to read. Each people would find how long they paid attention are worth to track, so I would like to see an option to set that value.

My vote for this!
admin  
#3 Posted : Thursday, September 19, 2013 8:52:36 AM(UTC)
admin

Rank: Administration

Joined: 4/13/2010(UTC)
Posts: 872

1. We will add it.
2. Not sure what we can do about this one. Windows explorer usually comes up when you use start menu, or probably also when desktop is active. But on my machine this is still pretty low, minute or two a day. Can you figure out why this happens, maybe Away is not triggered correctly?
3. We will have to update the design of the app, it does look dated. If there are any designers which use MT and would like to help, please let me know.
4. I'll add this to our todo list to look at when we have some extra time. I'm a bit skeptical we can make this work. We probably could get all the input coming from devices, but most likely a lot of those devices shouldn't affect your Away time. So in the end we would probably have to add some way of listing the devices so you can select the ones which can break the Away, then registering to their events. Then the question is, do these devices send any data when idle, and if they do will we know what is active and what is not...
reptc  
#4 Posted : Thursday, September 19, 2013 5:45:58 PM(UTC)
reptc

Rank: Newbie

Joined: 9/16/2013(UTC)
Posts: 3

I really appreciated for adding minimum time option. And when you add this option, would you consider the new option works with 'window titles' not only 'application names'?

As for Windows Explorer, I don't use sleep mode or screen savers. And one of the reason why I do this was gaming hours tracking. As I wrote above, ManicTime could not track gaming hours very well. With default settings, when I played video games for 2 hours (with only gamepads), then only first 5 mins of that tracked, and next 1h 55mins marked as 'away', then I had to manually tag away hours. I found it little cumbersome, so I turned off sleep mode & screen savers and ManicTime tracks gaming hours well since then. But as a side effect, I got 1156 hours of Windows Explorer usage this year.

Reading your explanation, input detection does seem hard to implement, indeed. And sound detection can solve the most of the issue indirectly, unless playing video game with sound volumes turned off. (which is rare) It can solve my issue with Explorer as well, but I still would find ignore list very useful in many other scenarios.

Edited by user Thursday, September 19, 2013 5:50:02 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

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