Logging user activity
TimeCache can track all your activity on your computer. This can
come in handy to put together a complete picture of what documents
you worked on in which applications throughout the day.
To use activity tracking, first turn it on in
TimeCache Preferences. You will also need to activate Universal
Access in OS X's System Preferences if it is not already enabled.
(TimeCache can do it for you when you turn on activity tracking in
TimeCache Preferences.
The User Activity window can show
you every window activated throughout the day
Once activity logging is turned on, TimeCache adds entries to its
User Activity window based on your settings in TimeCache
Preferences. You can show the Activity log by choosing . Each listing includes the
application name, window name, start time, stop time, and elapsed
time. TimeCache continues to add entries to the log until you quit
TimeCache or turn off activity logging.
Saving activity as Daily Log
entries
TimeCache lets you save one or more listings in the User activity
window as a Daily Log entry. To do so, select all the User activity
listings you want included in one Daily Log entry (by clicking,
Shift-clicking, or ⌘-clicking listings). You may want to first sort
listings by application or window name. In order to do so, just
click the appropriate column header at the top of the User activity
list. Then click Create Entry to begin the process of creating a
Daily Log entry. TimeCache prompts you for the name of a
project/matter to bill the time to, as well as a billing category
to use. You are also given the opportunity to add a descriptive
note. If you provide a project and billing category, TimeCache
totals the elapsed time for each of the selected lines and applies
that to your Daily Log entry.
Saving a log of your activity
TimeCache can save your activity tracking data to a tab-delimited
file for further analysis in other applications. You can either set
TimeCache Preferences to save all entries
automatically, or you can click Export
in the User Activity window to save its contents to a file.
TimeCache also gives you the option of going directly to the User
Activity Tracking panel of TimeCache Preferences to change the log
file by clicking the Set Log File
button. If you set up TimeCache Preferences to automatically export
user activity to a log file, you can set an option to generate a
new log file for each day.
TimeCache saves the same information you see in the User Activity
window, with the addition of dates included with start and stop
times, and the total number of seconds for each line in a separate
field of its own. This last item allows you to more easily total
your overall time in another application if desired. TimeCache uses
your text encoding setting for exporting reports for saving activity
logs.
You can export only selected list entries by first selecting those
rows you want to export, and then holding down the Option key on
your keyboard. When you move the mouse over the Export button, its title changes to Export Selected. Clicking it in this state saves
only the highlighted rows.
TimeCache saves these files with a file extension of "tcalog" in
order to allow loading logs (see next paragraph). You can view
these log files in other applications by dragging them over an
application's Finder icon or Dock icon. Alternatively, you can
change the "tcalog" extension to "txt" in the Finder to enable
opening them with a double-click.
Loading a previously saved log
You can load entries that were saved in a log file back into the
User activity window by clicking Load
log and locating the file on your hard drive.
If you want to clear the entries from the User Activity window,
click Clear and confirm that you want
to delete all entries when prompted.
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