The Glass is Too Big - Home

While I'm thinking about the grander ideas around attention, I'm also prototyping and experimenting with the little bits that will make up whatever I end up with. Part of that is wanting to track what windows are open and how often.

Aside from this generally supporting my idea that recording as much as possible is a necessary step to figuring a LOT of stuff out, this has direct applications. The most obvious that jumps to mind is sorting a Start menu by actual time of use instead of the arbitrary methods used by Windows.

This is a VERY simple Autohotkey script that I wrote during the "Ambient Findability" presentation at SXSW last week. (I actually got quite a bit of stuff done during several of the panels). At any rate, it checks for whatever window has primary focus every 5 seconds. The title of that window is dumped into a text file.



#Persistent

SetTimer, DescribeWindow, 5000

return

DescribeWindow:

WinGetActiveStats, Title, Width, Height, X, Y

FileAppend %Title% `n, window_log.txt

return



Obviously, a more robust implementation would be better, but it goes to show just how simple some of the recording can actually be.

Features that should really be present would include:

• Only logging when the new primary window is new and recording the time on the previous one.
  
  
• Detecting mouse/keyboard movement or screensaver kicking in. This would indicate that the window that's presently focused isn't actually in front of a person and the logging should pause until someone's back at the helm.
  
  
• Parsing out things like the app name (Firefox) from the document loaded (page title). While both are useful data points, they are seperate. If I juggle 300 Word docs in a day, the fact they're all in Word is important, but knowing which documents I use most often is also important. This script jams both together.
  
  
• File management to ensure that this thing doesn't grow unchecked. Having been on the problem side of more than one server outage caused by a 2GB logfile that someone "forgot" to manage with rotation, I know how quickly this can sneak up on you.
  
  

P.S. To keep the attention stuff from overflowing, here are a couple of other bits.

• I registered a domain and set up a placeholder site at Attenable.com (during the DIY panel at SXSW (Hey, I got inspired)) for whatever I polish up for this whole topic. Not sure what shape that will take.
  
  
• I'm talking with Garrick Van Buren this week to talk about attention as a podcast interview.
  
  

© 2003- 2010 J Wynia. Very Few Rights Reserved.