Minute, a friendly keylogger and visualization thereof

February 14, 2012 8:18 PM

Minute, a friendly keylogger and visualization thereof
With the accompanying infographic-heavy blog post, it does what it says on the tin and more. Tracks your keystrokes, makes beautiful pictures and surprising observations from the data. Open source, and you can download 50 days of my data.

For the tech people: main ingredients are a Cocoa app, d3 for the main visualizations, canvas & custom code for the rest, and persistence. I can't say that all the code is ready for mass consumption, but for tinkering and for that big observation that something regarded as evil - surveillance - can be used for something good and personal, and the odd meta-side that this project reflects, and shows, the project being made.

Role: programmer, designer, author, typist

posted by tmcw (3 comments total)

Hey, this is awesome, i've been fascinated by simple views of presence and keyboard use like this. I like the idea and the visualization style.

I tried to build the ObjC code for the agent from GitHub and ran into a few minor problems, then when it ran it never seemed to log anything. Would you like me to file some GitHub issues? Or is this more a one off release because you're done with the project?
posted by Nelson at 10:34 AM on February 15, 2012

Definitely more than a one-off project - I just don't have the time to try any fresh installs (OSX 'virtual machines' are.. lame, and I've run into the weird corner where to test changes I have to turn it off :) Let me know what you're running into, and it might be possible to make some quick fixes to make this easier for others to set up.
posted by tmcw at 2:42 PM on February 15, 2012

Beautiful! Holy crap, javascript has gotten good at, well, a lot of things.
posted by ignignokt at 11:48 AM on February 16, 2012