watch - very simple application usage logger for OS X 10.7+

watch is a small, low footprint launchd daemon that listens for application switches and idle states and logs events to a simple sqlite database.

Building

make && make install

installs the binary, launchd plist, and a small shell frontend. To (re)start the daemon and begin logging, use

watch.sh start

To remove, make uninstall. To remove and get rid of the log db entirely, make purge.

Use

watch.sh is a very thin frontend over sqlite's command line application that allows easy access to the db and some obvious statistics.

Usage: watch.sh [start|stop|query|last|since|totals|help]

start/stop        - control the monitoring daemon
query <sql>       - directly query the log db via the sqlite command line application (see watch.sh query '.schema')
last <n>          - show the last n events
since <datetime>  - show all events since the given ISO 8601-formatted date
totals <opts>     - show running usage total. suboptions:
   -i               - include idle times in total (false)
   -f:-t <datetime> - from/to: limit totals to specified ISO 8601 timerange
   -m <seconds>     - minimum event duration to include in totals (5s)
   -d               - show per-day average usage rather than sum
   -a               - include everything

Note that some functions of the shell script require sqlite 3.8.3, available in OS X 10.10+ and on previous versions via homebrew.