MeeTimer is to the browser as Wakoopa is to the OS
Nothing like a little mobile-tech analogy for the late afternoon, I always say. When I started my "web-only" challenge by living life in a browser, I installed Wakoopa to help keep me honest. The application silently records what apps I use and then compiles the information for all to see. After a month, you can see I’ve used Firefox nearly exclusively. Unfortunately, I already knew I was using Firefox nearly exclusively. More important to me now is what am I using it for?
Enter MeeTimer, a 68 KB extension for Firefox that locally tracks how long I’m on various websites. The timer is shown at the bottom Firefox and you can see it counting away as you sit on a site. Hovering over the timer brings a pop-up box with information on the sites: you can list each individual site along with the time spent on it or you can group sites. I find the grouping to be useful from a productivity standpoint. For example, I can put my social sites (FeedFriend, Twitter, etc…) in a group called Social and have MeeTimer aggregate the time spent on them. If I see too many hours there, I can adjust my actions going foward in my Work sites, i.e.: Google Reader, TypePad, etc…
If you check my Wakoopa profile, you’ll see that I used Microsoft Excel for about 5 minutes last week. It’s worth noting the reason why I used, not the fact that I did. Honest truth: I was in a rush. I had all of five minutes before an appointment to check some spreadsheets (masters track results, if you must know) and I didn’t want to waste the time downloading them only to upload them back to Google Docs. Working in the clouds, isn’t quite seamless yet… it’s getting there, but we’ve got a ways to go.
This is interesting but I wonder what kind of performance hit my PC will take? Running Avast! already slows it and a frikkin XP update MS slipped to my PC like a mickey has gobbled up RAM and more cycles too.
Does this work if you’ve got multiple tabs open? What if I have a tab open and walk away from the PC for an hour?
Mike, I don’t see a noticeable performance hit, but of course, every system is different based on hardware specs, configuration, etc… If you’re using Firefox, give MeeTimer a try; if you see major performance lag, you can easily disable or remove the extension.
Jonathan, this works well with multiple tabs. MeeTimer doesn’t keep the clock ticking on multiple tabs when you’re not looking at a tab. It keeps separate timers for each tab and the clock only moves on the active, open tab. In the example you gave, it would clock the full hour you were away UNLESS you minimized the browser before walking away.
OK, I just this moment added it. If it really screws things up, you’re toast, Fiend Kevin! Toast *without* butter! I am so cruel.
CloudFiend Kevin, did you see this?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/docs_and_spreadsheets_goes_down/
Mike, I don’t use butter, so if I’m toast… so be it.
No I didn’t see the Register’s article, but I did know of the Google Docs outage as it was happening. See me latest post.
BTW, I’ve taken a deeper look at MeeTimer this morning. I noticed that the timer had stopped while I was reading a web page. After some testing, I realized that it is stopping by itself after around 30 seconds of no mouse or keyboard activity, so you can walk away from the browser and it won’t count all of the time.