Wizard's Blog

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Back in 2007 I heard about a program for the Mac called Slife.  It’s a program that creates a display of your application usage for the day:

Slife screenshot

It looked pretty interesting, but was unfortunately Mac only.

Then in early 2008, a beta of a Windows version of Slife was announced.  I signed up for the beta immediately but didn’t hear back until a few days ago.  I don’t know whether it was a closed beta or whether I just failed to see a download link.  In any case, both Mac and Windows v2 beta versions are now available.

So now that I actually have my hands on a copy of the software, I quite like it.  It sits unobtrusively in the system tray unless you want to have a look at your stats, which is when you see the pretty display.

As well as just showing you your application usage, it also helps you increase or decrease your usage to make you more productive.  First of all you set up an Activity, which consists of one or more applications or websites, and you choose a goal.  For example you might want to spend at least eight hours a day using your line of business application or no more than one hour a day surfing frivolous websites.  I couldn’t get Activities to work because I wanted to use it for web sites and Slife is incompatible with Google Chrome at the moment.

I think if I didn’t know Slife had first been developed for the Mac I’d be wondering why it was so Mac-ish:

• The installer doesn’t put it in the startup group, so as of the next time you reboot it’ll stop stracking your activity.
• The display is very fetching, but there seems to be no logic to where it puts the little coloured dots.  Each time you use an application it adds a dot (or a line if you use the application for long enough without switching).  If you switch between windows in an application you get a dot on a different line (there are five lines per application).  The confusing thing for me is that each line doesn’t represent a window within an application – sometimes the same windw is spread over different lines and multiple windows are in the same line.
• You don’t really have a lot of control over the display – it scrolls horizontally to keep the selected column in the center, but what if you don’t want a column selected?  There are no horizontal scrollbars.  And although you can scale the display horizontally to effectively zoom in and out, it doesn’t scale vertically, and each row takes up a lot of space.  This can be a problem if you’ve run a lot of applications during a day.  Since you can’t rearrange the rows, it makes it impossible to see the first app you used in the day next to the last one.

But then that’s what betas are for, I suppose.

If you’re interested, you can watch a video showing Slife’s features here.

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