Filed under: iLife, Multimedia, Software, Odds and ends, Internet Tools
Slife 1.0 Awareness Browser
Slife is a rather unusual piece of software. I tried it out in its previous incarnation (Onlife), but it has now been released under a new name and seems considerably more polished. Its developer calls Slife an "awareness browser" which "let's you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before." Basically, Slife "observes" your use of applications like Safari, Mail, iChat, iTunes, Word, NetNewsWire, etc., and records what you're doing with them (e.g. what web pages you looked at, the text of your emails, what songs you listened to, etc.). You can then visualize these interactions in a variety of different ways (e.g. one visualization is a kind of scatterplot over time) and go back and see what you were doing on your computer at any given time. In other words, it's sort of like a global history of your computer use, which instead of merely recording what pages you've looked at in your browser, records what you were doing at any given time in a bunch of different applications. You can also search through all of this mess, to find things you were doing, but perhaps lost track of or forgot where you looked at them. Finally, SlifeLabs offers a subscription service called Slifeshare where "you can share your Slife activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about" (I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to do that, but whatever). While something like this is definitely not going to appeal to everyone, Slife has a lot of potential to help you keep track of things you've lost and to understand better how you use your own computer. And since it's a free download, I think it's definitely worth a look.[Via MacMinute]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Adrian vG said 7:04AM on 2-16-2007
Sounds more like a tool for your boss...
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Josh said 10:46AM on 2-16-2007
Well at least you'd have proof of an alibi if you were ever convicted of a crime.
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Joe said 11:15AM on 2-16-2007
You know who this isn't for? Anyone who looks at porn. So, everyone.
Unless you can easily turn it off or go back and remove items at a later date.
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Edison Thomaz said 11:58AM on 2-16-2007
Hi there - I am the Slife/Slifeshare developer. Just a quick clarification, the Slifeshare service is actually completely free, just like Slife. But we offer a Premium account, with more features and that one costs $24/year.
When you think about these tools in your personal context, they can be useful and fun. With Slife you can have a better understanding of where you are spending your time - could be useful in a GTD kind of way, etc. Slife also lets you organize and tag information associated with your activities.
Slifeshare might sound a bit creepy at first, but really, it's just another way to express what you are doing. People do it all the time, with things like Last.fm and Twitter. Our site automates the process a little bit more, lets you share a few more things and gives you lots of privacy controls. You can share everything or just your top web sites. You can think of it as a friend-based metadata aggregation service.
I write a little bit more about these ideas on my blog at www. ethomaz.com. Feel free to write at anytime with thoughts and ideas. We want to improve Slife and Slifeshare and any feedback would be appreciated.
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(01) said 12:42PM on 2-16-2007
I was a user of Onlife and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, several problems with the app, as well as the realization that the cache was taking up over 1 gig of HD space on my MBP made me AppZap. I'll definitely check this new reiteration out, hopefully it's an improvement on the original.
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Neven said 12:43PM on 2-16-2007
A lot of work went into Slife. The app looks really sharp, professional, and well thought-out. I had an idea for something like this and Slife matched my thoughts on how it should look very closely.
However, like that other recent prettyboy app, Tangerine, Slife suffers from a serious problem: it does what it's supposed to do very poorly.
It comes with plugins ("detectors") for a few apps; very few, some would say. No iLife, no iWork, no Adobe software. Those three alone take up 80% of my time. Even the plugins that do ship with Slife are buggy. Only Safari and Finder (not there by default) logged correctly - Mail and iChat did not. I wrote my own AppleScript bit to track my usage of iPhoto, and it did nothing (I promise that my AppleScript was correct.)
Even so, it seems a little ridiculous for me to be writing scripts for all the apps I use. Slife needs to offer a much, much broader plugin base, and it would help if they actually worked. Even so, I'm not terribly optimistic about its future. Sorry, Slife dudes.
P.S. For those afraid of having their porn logged: Slife has a very simple and usable way of switching to a "Private mode" where nothing gets logged. Don't worry, the devs like their porn as much as you do.
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Stuart said 12:56PM on 2-16-2007
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Edison Thomaz said 7:53PM on 2-16-2007
Hey Neven - I am willing to work with you to look into the problems you had with Slife in the past. If something is broken, let's fix it! Feel free to get in touch with me. I would be curious to see what happened, as the Mail and iChat plugins do work. You can also send me your iPhoto plug in and I will see what's going on.
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jurysch said 5:34PM on 2-17-2007
I used it for a while back when it was Onlife. At the time I decided to have it running 24/7, so that it truly would capture everything I did.
I came to find that I had no reason for running Onlife. It had its fair share of bugs, including a really annoying one that would ruin the program thumbnails Expose generates. Other than that, the program was well done, but it didn't really matter.
I would archive all this metadata about what I did -- Safari, iTunes, Adium, etc. Having that archived never really seemed to help me that much. So what if I played that Regina Spektor track back in August of last year? iTunes at least tells me when I last played a track and how often. Safari -- typically if I have to remember a site I'll bookmark it to del.icio.us, or at the very worst have to look through the history. Adium nicely logs all conversations (if so desired), so I didn't really need that tracked externally either.
Kudos to the developers for some solid software, but I really fail to see how the average computer user's supposed to find it ultimately useful. I can't even imagine what your friends & family would find interesting in all your metadata.
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