onlife file usage visualization

19 September 2005

onlife.jpgan application for Mac OS X that 'observes' every user interaction with sofware applications such as Safari, Mail & iChat, by creating a 'personal shoebox' of all visited web pages, read emails, written documents & much more. onlife then makes the contents of this shoebox searchable & displays all the interactions between the user & the applications over time. its concept is based on the assumption that 'one day we will be to compile a personal repository of all the books we read, letters we write, movies we watch & calls we make'.
4 different visualizations exist: by day, month, year or as a table view. every application that is observed is identified by a different color. the 'dots' in the graphical views correspond to different items. their length refer to the observation duration of the item & their location to the observation time.
the resulting visualization resembles a combination of a calendar & those typically dotted genetic maps. unfortunately, I cannot readily test this application by lack of a personal Mac, but any reviews are always welcome in the comments section. [ethomaz.com]

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aesthetic & collection & infovis . comments (1)

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comments

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. As unfortunate as it is, Microsoft Outlook on the PC had a feature like this called "journal" which was useful to figure out how you spent your day, or pick up where you left off if say, your computer died on you.

Since Safari dies somewhat often (it doesn't like as many windows open as I throw at it), this and Saft will help. It's also cool to just see the patterns of my use, and also my interruptions via IM at work :)

I'll see how things progress. I also want to see how performance is on a G4 or a slower G5 than the dual 2.5 I have at home (with 4gigs of RAM, my others only have 512 megs and 1.25 gigs respectively).

ethan kaplan . 19 September 2005

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