Mac Activity Logger

This script logs the currently active application and related metadata to a local SQLite database on macOS. The goal of the project is to help me understand how I spend my time on my computer. Some ways how this data could be used later:

• Generate reports showing the amount of time spent in each application. Identify trends in usage over time.
• Analyze time spent on websites and categorize them as productive, leisure, educational, etc.
• Set goals for certain metrics, like maximum hours per day spent on leisure websites. Track progress towards these goals over time.
• Use URL data to identify patterns.
• Apply machine learning to app and website categories to automatically detect productive vs distracting usage patterns.

Features

• Logs the foreground application name every time the script is run
• If Google Chrome is the active app, also logs the active tab URL and title
• Saves timestamped records to a SQLite database for persistent storage
• Uses AppKit via AppleScript to get active app information
• Errors are logged to a separate file for diagnostics

Requirements

• macOS
• Python 3
• SQLite 3

Usage

• Run the mac_activity_logger.py script on a schedule via Launchpad or cron
• The local SQLite database will be created at ~/Documents/app_activity_db.sqlite
• Log files will be created at ~/Documents/app_activity_errors.log
• View and query the database with SQLite tools like DB Browser for SQLite

$ sqlite3 ~/Documents/app_activity_db.sqlite "SELECT * FROM app_activity ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 10;"
2023-08-29 12:29:47.289955|Terminal||
2023-08-29 12:29:37.109373|Terminal||
2023-08-29 12:29:26.904139|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:29:16.644958|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:29:06.383001|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:28:56.088728|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:28:45.836765|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:28:35.571242|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:28:25.285999|Google Chrome|...
2023-08-29 12:28:14.999757|Telegram||

Run on Startup

To run this script in the background on startup every 5 seconds, you can create a launchd plist file.

Here are the steps:

1. Create a file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.app_activity.plist with this content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.user.app_activity</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>python</string>
    <string>/full/path/to/your_script.py</string>
  </array>

  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>5</integer>
  
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  
  <key>KeepAlive</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

2. Load the plist to start the script:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.user.app_activity.plist