Ask HN: Open source rules engine for categorizing applications by productivity?

2 points

9 years ago

As a user of RescueTime, I like how they automatically calculate your productivity by categorizing the applications you use, e.g., Facebook is classified as 'social' and 'unproductive', while sublime text is classified as 'development' and 'productive'.

What I don't like is that they have no way to associate time with individual projects, e.g., 2 hours 'development' on projA and 3 hours 'development' on projA.

After lots of research, I came across WakaTime [2] which claims to track projects, but only for their supported text editors and also ManicTime [3] which claims to track projects across all applications (Windows only).

Finally, I found Selfspy [4] which is free, open source, and tracks all applications. I figure it wouldn't be too difficult to track projects by querying the db. E.g., I could set up a basic rules engine to match window titles --> projects via keyword matching.

But in order to replicate the application categorization that RescueTime provides, I would have to implement an extensive rules engine for every popular application. Is there any publicly available data set with this information?

[1] https://www.rescuetime.com

[2] https://wakatime.com

[3] http://www.manictime.com/

[4] https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy

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