ActivityWatch is a cross-platform open-source and privacy-respecting time monitoring application.
It informs you of the activities you have been doing on your devices.
With its latest 0.11 release, ActivityWatch has made progress on the user experience along with several technical improvements.
Let’s dive right into the features this version has to offer.
Refreshed Web UI Design
Here are some of the most remarkable updates regarding the UI:
- The application’s categories can now have colors. Therefore, you can easily differentiate between the durations you are passing on your work, games, music, etc.
- The Timeline (barchart) visualization now supports categories and the weekly/monthly view.
- You can view labels of your activities under the Sunburst category. That is done in the form of a doughnut chart. Consequently, you can visually figure out how much time a task is taking.
- There is now a button [show less] under the Summary section and another block in settings for using fallback colors.
- You can see each of the tasks you are doing in a percentage format.
I should mention that the team behind the project is putting good efforts to improve the application’s UI.
Improved macOS Support
Although there were few changes regarding macOS, ActivityWatcher is gradually progressing towards being a useful open source cross-platform application.
Here are the two additions that seem critical:
- The most important update macOS has seen in this version is a fixed security vulnerability.
- The Edge browser can now integrate with the application. That was not the case, however, because ActivityWatch could not collect data from this browser.
Other Improvements
There are some other features added with this release that are subtle but useful additions:
- Ability to import/export categories
- Improved layout of settings
- Adds basic search feature
Also, this release switched all the Python-based modules to toml configuration. In other words, ActivityWatch is embracing a minimalistic configuration format.
It is worth mentioning that version 0.11.0 supports more applications in comparison to earlier versions.
Moreover, if you want to explore more about the application and installation instructions, you can check out our article on ActivityWatch.
For a complete list of changes, browse through the official changelog.
Summing Up
After seven months of continuous development, ActivityWatch 0.11 is bringing in new enhancements to better track how you spend time on your devices.
Even if it is a relatively new application, it delivers innovative tools for the end-user.
Do you use tools like ActivityWatch to resist procrastination? Do you use them to improve your time management skills?
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