FINISHED

Its finally finished! If you don’t know, I’ve been making an app to track information about how I use my computer, and a companion website to display the data. Right now, it logs every click, as well as the positions and dimensions of apps every 5 minutes. The dashboard website then displays that data in a variety of interesting ways.

The collector is now (in theory) compatible with the majority of Linux desktops (sorry Windows users, maybe next year). I also added a small config file. Right now this only stores the window-snapshot interval, which you can change through the UI. I originally planned on adding a list of apps to ignore, but there were too many problems. Primarily, I wasn’t sure how to reliably handle the focused app being blocked without making it null, which is very messy, and the whole thing seemed too complicated for a feature I’m don’t really plan on using. I also considered making it a frontend filter, but chose not to for a similar reason.

Once again, you can try it yourself here with my data. If you want to collect your own data, you can download the collector here (note: you need to give your user input permissions for this to detect clicks, more details in the README).

I’ve only tested this on my machine (KDE Wayland) so if you have a different setup, tell me how it goes!

Afterword

I had a lot of fun making this. This was my deepest dive into web development yet and I learned so much. This is also the first time I’ve shipped a project for public use, which was a has been a valuable experience. I could definitely do more with this (more config, more charts, more data), and I do plan on revisiting it in the future, but I think this is a good place to leave it for now. Thanks for reading, see you next project :)