Development Update August 2018

It’s now been 104 days since the last “bimonthly” development update, this means:

  1. It’s time for a new one, and this is a unusually good “bimonthly” update. :ok_hand:
  2. Development updates will now be quarterly.

Milestones :checkered_flag:

2018-05-28: We released v0.8.0b2. :ship:

  • Major performance improvement: pre-merging of heartbeats. (aw-client#33)
  • Query2 now supports a syntax for creating lists, allowing queries to return multiple things. (aw-core#50)
  • View full diff on GitHub.

2018-05-30: We released v0.8.0b3. :ship:

  • Major performance improvements by pre-merging heartbeats on the server and client-side
  • Improved design of the web UI
  • Implemented flooding (aw-core#58) which significantly improving the accuracy some types of events (notably window events, see this issue for numbers).
  • View full diff on GitHub.

2018-06-22: We hit 1000 stars on GitHub :star2:

2018-07-03: We hit 5000 downloads :arrow_down: and we released v0.8.0b4! :ship:

2018-07-09: We released v0.8.0b5. :ship:

2018-07-17: We hit over 200 daily active users for the web watcher. :chart_with_upwards_trend:

2018-08-14: We hit 6000 downloads :arrow_down:

2018-08-27: We released v0.8.0b6. :ship:

  • Added a new timeline visualization to better visualize event history. (aw-webui#97)
  • Fixed the highly popular Windows-specific issue where all modules started by aw-qt also opened a terminal window which they ran in. (activitywatch#212)
  • View full diff on GitHub.

Unknown date:

  • At some point we implemented support for the text editors Vim and VSCode, probably in v0.8.0b4. This included a visualization in the web UI where you can see the most edited files, most edited languages, and most edited projects!

Going forward :running_woman:

  • Raw SQL datastore
    • @johan-bjareholt is still working on a raw SQL implementation of the Peewee datastore that is expected to give further performance improvements, among other things. (aw-core#57)
  • Import bucket API (aw-server#41)
    • And later web UI button to make export/import cycle possible, enabling the ability to manually move data between instances with a simple export file.
  • Decentralized sync
    • We’ve started researching the possibility for a very simple type of sync where you choose a folder that is being synced by Syncthing/Dropbox/Google Drive which is then used to exchange data between hosts. (aw-server#50)
    • A huge step towards finally implementing a decentralized sync MVP (thanks to Syncthing :heart:).

What else?

During the summer @ErikBjare, @johan-bjareholt, @Powersource, and three other wonderful people have been developing Thankful under the group name Superuser Labs. We think we’re onto something kinda amazing, but we have a bit to go before it’s an improvement over existing donation methods.

Support us! :heart: :money_with_wings:

Last month we only received $13 in donations (after fees), that means your donation could be extra important to us. Do you use ActivityWatch and want to see many updates like this in the future? Support us on Patreon or OpenCollective!

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