Windows only: ManicTime is a detailed time-tracking application for keeping tabs on where your workday goes. Get a handle on how you spend your time with tags, graphs, and reports. If you were intrigued by previously reviewed RescueTime but were turned off by the idea of uploading all your data to the RescueTime servers, ManicTime offers a very similar set of tools but stores your data locally. ManicTime runs as a background process and consumes very few resources. When open, ManicTime records which programs are open and what files they’re accessing. Even if you never plugged any input into it, the app would do a very thorough job telling you when you were working and what you were working on. There are three primary timelines in ManicTime: the activity line shows whether you were idle or active, the application line shows which applications were in use, and the tag line is for user supplied information about the work at hand. You can tag both idle and active blocks of time by simply highlighting them and applying the tag. The ability to tag idle time adds a great deal of functionality to the application: you can tag time spent in meetings, making phone calls, or even time logged at the gym. The tag system makes it easy to keep tabs on what work you’re doing for different projects and clients—an especially handy feature for people who spend all their time using a similar set of applications for nearly every task at work. You can graph user specified blocks of time based on a variety of parameters like the basic active/idle cycles, by applications, or tags to see how your time is spent. ManicTime is freeware, Windows only.
ManicTime [via MakeUseOf]Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Popular bookmark syncing Firefox extension Foxmarks has added tag suggestions for bookmarks—making this already great service just that much better. The new tag suggestions, which are based on what other people used to tag the same page, show up when you edit the tags for a bookmark—rounding out a feature set that includes password syncing, sync profiles, and mobile access. The only gripe is that the suggestions don’t appear to factor in your most popular tags, making it less useful for readers with rigid tagging standards—but you can turn off the new suggestions in the settings panel, and use previously mentioned UrlBarExt’s custom tag menu for quicker bookmarking instead. Foxmarks is a free download, works anywhere Firefox does—and recently updated to support IE and Safari, minus the password sync.
FoxmarksFacette, an MIT data organizing project, knows more about your Delicious bookmarks than you do. The free webapp and Firefox plug-in groups your links by what they’re about, media types, and more. The simplest way to check out what a “faceted” Delicious list looks like is to add your username to the end of Facette’s URL browser: facette.csail.mit.edu/user/your user name here. You’ll see a host of left-hand boxes that show different data types—general subject headings, blog post types, video and audio containers, and lots more. If that’s something you want to see more of, head to Facette’s main page and grab their Firefox plugin, which gives you the ability to add far more serious tags (pictured at right) when you’re bookmarking, and automatically takes you to the Facette view of Delicious pages. Facette is free to use (though a user study sign-up is request), requires a Delicious account to scan private bookmarks. Facette Delicious Browser [MIT Haystack]
