Linux app review: Activity journal

If you are a big Linux fan, get this application on to your Linux box. I love it. As shown in a screenshot on the previous post, Activity journal is like a diary for your Linux machine. That's right. It keeps in touch with everything and anything you do on your box. Powered by Zeitgeist and therefore requiring zeitgeist, its the perfect solution when you have forgotten the name of something you edited or watched last.

There are three views in the application. 

Your Ad Here

The first and default view shows activities from the last three days. Imagine this as a view from a calendar application in month view, but showing only three days

Three days of work captured by activity journal

The second view shows a preview of documents you edited and things you played around with for one day, separated into four quarters of the day; morning, afternoon etc. This view is good if you need to search for a picture, video, presentation, pdf, etc that you have edited lately.

A days work in preview mode

The third view brings the days work into a more detailed picture with activities showing the time and duration of when an activity was done.

My days activity and duration

I can't do without a pros and cons list

Pros

• Very helpful into having an insight of what you been up to these days on your computer
• Works fast... doesn't stall your system
• Works along side the zeitgeist engine, a new/old file indexing system. It does more... it indexes histories of files as well, leading up to applications like Activity journal and Tracker.
• Ease of use at its best for all three views

Cons

• Can't search for an activity. The magnifying glass that you think is the search button is in fact a cleverly disguised filter button. Filtered items have bold names on the view (which ever one of the three view it is).
• Doesn't record everything and anything. It misses out on some file formats and doesn't record your browser and messenger history as the filter tab leads you to believe to. Maybe the system defaults (FireFox and empathy on Ubuntu 10.10 works with Activity Journal but I can't verify this)
• Could use more features like ability to group activities within the journal into categories and etc.

Preview

Filter applied for Narwhal... and files highlighted in blue.

I know zeitgeist is going to go a long way, and maybe one day it will record everything that we do. Say what? Record everything? Maybe we want some exception so that a third party accessing the system could possibly never know what we have been up to... not through activity journal anyway. Linux have so far proven to be an advocacy of privacy (no keyloggers on my system), so why not keep our heads above the water level and see clearly.