Workin’ Too Hard is a utility which logs the activity on your Macintosh and maintains a window with a plot of this activity over time. Workin’ Too Hard allows you to monitor your own usage of the Mac, so that you know when it’s time to stop work and go home.
The salient features of Workin’ Too Hard include:
• Requires System 7.
• Requires a colour capable Macintosh.
• PowerBook savvy.
• Freeware.
Installation and Use
Installation
Installation is easy! Simply run Workin’ Too Hard and position the window appropriately. You may also want to put an alias to the application in your Startup Items folder, so that it starts every time your Mac boots.
Understanding the Display
The Workin’ Too Hard display window is a scrolling log showing user activity versus time. The following illustration shows a blown up view of the Workin’ Too Hard display window, with arrows pointing to specific areas of interest.
Salient features of the display include:
• Each horizontal pixel represents fifteen minutes.
• There is a horizontal tick mark every hour (4 pixels).
• There is a large tick mark every twelve hours.
• Each large tick is tagged with a midday or midnight icon.
• The beginning of each day is tagged with a day .
• Times of no activity are marked in green.
• Times of maximum activity are marked in red.
• Times when no records were kept are not drawn at all.
Every time Workin’ Too Hard records a data point, it saves the log to the disk. This means that you can quit and relaunch the program, or restart your Macintosh, without losing your activity log.
Sleepin’ Too Hard
PowerBooks represent a particular challenge to Workin’ Too Hard. When the PowerBook sleeps, the program is not capable of logging data points. Workin’ Too Hard carefully takes this into account, not logging data points while the machine is sleeping.
The other special PowerBook code relates to saving the activity log. Workin’ Too Hard will not attempt to save the activity log if the hard disk is spun down. This means that your hard disk won’t spin up just to save some non-critical logging data. The next time the hard spins up, Workin’ Too Hard will save all the activity information.
Wrapup
Source Code
Full source code to Workin’ Too Hard is available in the Source folder. The source was compiled with the Metrowerks Pascal compiler from CodeWarrior 9.
Caveats
Workin’ Too Hard only records mouse activity. If you’re typing furiously but never move the mouse, Workin’ Too Hard will not recognise that you’ve been working.
Workin’ Too Hard cannot differentiate between work and play. So if you spend all afternoon browsing the net, Workin’ Too Hard will report you as working.
Workin’ Too Hard saves its preferences it the application itself. This means it won’t record your activity if you run it from a read-only volume.
Version History
Version 1.0b1 is the first released version.
Credits
Workin’ Too Hard was written by Quinn “The Eskimo!” in an attempt to stop himself staying at work too long.
The latest version of Workin’ Too Hard should be available from <ftp://ftp.quinn.echidna.id.au/Others/Quinn/>
Workin’ Too Hard is distributed as Freeware. If you like it, please drop me a line.
