How ActivityWatch could be better

ActivityWatch is great in a lot of ways (in my opinion at least). But not in every way.

Here’s my attempt at keeping a list on the things we don’t do as well as we could. I expect to update this list over time.

Features RescueTime have that’s not in ActivityWatch (yet)

  • Sync
    • Our plan is to support sync using a variety of storage methods which will enable sync to services like Syncthing (private and decentralized), Google Drive, and Dropbox.
  • Easy setup and getting started
    • We’re getting there: we hope to end up with an installer for Windows, packages for Linux, and a .app for macOS
    • Windows installer
    • macOS .app (delivered in .dmg, will be available in v0.9)
    • Linux .deb package
  • Android support
    • This is a big one as a lot of people spend more time in front of their phones than in front of their desktop or laptop. We’ve been planning it for a while now and will probably start working on it soonish.
    • Edit: Basic version done, more improvements to come.
  • Auto-categorize’s activities
  • Classify productive time by category/app name/window title/browser tab.
    • This is used to give an aggregate productivity score for a given time period. Such as “Today you had 25% more productive time than yesterday” or “This month had 6% more productive time than last week”
  • Integrations with a lot of third-party services (which we might be able to do as well in many cases)

Neat things about other services than RescueTime

  • WakaTime has pretty good file editor analytics (we could use all the existing open source WakaTime editor plugins)
  • ManicTime has pretty crazy tagging features, I feel like I should know more about ManicTime.
  • Zenobase is great in general, but privacy is suboptimal
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Once we have a stable release, adding a formula to homebrew would be great. AW could even install launchd useragent profiles to start aw on login. Right now it looks like you’re shooting for an .app bundle on macOS, so homebrew would be installing your pre-packaged .dmg etc. via something like brew cask install activity-watch

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