Revisiting Wakoopa to track my regular software

Some time ago Paul Stamatiou (one of Skribit founders and developers) did a post on “What software do i use on a regular basis” suggestion. I liked the idea so added copy of suggestion to my Skribit widget.

Counting software usage manually sounded troublesome so I revisited Wakoopa and installed their tracker.

Wakoopa improvements

In past brief review I concluded that Wakoopa has a lot of room for growth. It got lots of interesting functions since that time. I hadn’t explored deeply but these are ones I noticed:

• points and levels system to encourage user contribution (I am level 4 Devotee already);
• tag cloud that displays software usage as tasks performed;
• personalized recommendations of software;
• ratings of most used software by type;
• tracking of web services.

It became way more interesting to use and explore. I am running tracker for bit over a week now (at home desktop). There are some glitches in tracking – like applications getting misdetected by executable name (client.exe is kinda common) but overall it is roughly precise.

My top desktop software

1. Opera (~25 hours).
2. FeedDemon (~5 hours).
3. Windows Live Writer (~3 hours). “Best of worst” blogging client.
4. Media Player Classic (~3 hours).
5. QIP Infium (~2 hours). ICQ and Google Talk client.
6. Total Commander (~1.5 hours). Best file manager ever.
7. Firefox (~1.5 hours). Plugin for Firebug/YSlow.
8. Notepad++ (~40 minutes).

A lot of Opera, which covers browsing, email and Twitter (web and widget). Much less time spent on RSS feeds with my productivity improvement after moving to Newsgator. Some time watching video, however my video fix is mostly away from home PC. Less time writing posts for blog than I expected (getting faster). More instant messaging than I expected. A lot of time messing with internals of this blog (long road to perfection).

My top background software

• Dropbox.
• SpeedFan.
• AutoIt script. RSS publishing stuff.
• Samurize. Performance monitor.
• NOD32. Antivirus.
• uTorrent.
• Comodo Firewall.
• HTTP File Server.
• Process Explorer.

All of these run constantly. Three distinct tasks – security, file-sharing and system monitoring. I want to do a post on Samurize all the time (excellent performance monitor) but it took me few attempts to like it and days to perfect my config – advanced stuff.

My top web services

1. Twitter (~30 minutes).
2. Google search (~30 minutes).
3. WordPress (~15 minutes).
4. Google Analytics (~6 minutes).
5. Wikipedia (~3 minutes).

Twitter is too low (Opera widget is probably not detected as such). Cured of stat obsession after getting rid of Woopra. Too little time on Wikipedia, I definitely read a lot there.

Software recommendations

• Orbit Downloader.
• foobar2000.
• Winamp.
• FileZilla.
• avast.

Two media players, two file-related utilities, one antivirus. All solid apps, but also all known to me. I’d prefer some hidden gems suggestions. Feature is marked as beta at Wakoopa so I expect it to improve.

Overall

Wakoopa is definitely on right course adding plenty of information and statistics to bare bone usage time.

As for my software usage – at home I mostly hang out online, work on my blogging stuff and watch video. Reminds me I am behind on C++ (again) and that I should stop toying with code inside of this blog – interesting but major time waster.

Link http://wakoopa.com/Rarst

I had also came to another point of reconsidering what I do and read online. Which will end up in massive RSS unsubscribing as usual. Lately I became constantly annoyed with reading same things in metablogging field so it is time to drop quantity and look for quality.

Had you ever tried to put together list of what you do at computer? Were result expected or revealing?