New beta with %winTitle field you can use:
Been a while since I updated my software so I'm a little rusty and thought I'd try a quick one-feature beta release.  Let me know if the new %winTitle does what you want/expect.

-mouser (March 17, 2021, 05:41 AM)

That is great. I will try to give it a test in the coming days.

...I have occasionally thought of making a kind of hybrid app that was a combination of Automatic Screenshotter plus some more information, with a more flexible system for browsing history of activity, so it could be used more as a way of tracking one's own activity history.. I'd be interested in hearing more ideas along these lines..
I guess the idea is that it would try to log the activity you perform on your computer, with screenshots, to show you what activities you were doing, what apps you launched, documents opened, etc.

-mouser (March 17, 2021, 05:44 AM)

Very interesting.  I have long standing interested in a single application that gives me a great deal of control in building a history like that.  Automatically logging file activity, in conjunction with screen screenshots would would provide a lot of contextual information to help navigate the files.

I am not sure what is possible to log/capture from the system automatically- but having the ability to layer different types of activity to create a fairly accurate account of what was done would be attracted to person’s interested in auditing their time, recreating or remember something they had done, and even those who are involved in the life logging/quantified self community.

In my opinion,  capturing whatever can be captured automatically, would mean the user would not be required to input information.  However, I think it would be important for the user to be able to annotate or otherwise add context to what is being logged and captured with as little friction as possible.

Viewing the log of activity and being able to navigate it quickly would be great, but also being able to filter, search, and even analyze it would be great.  Maybe even generate a report or save a query based on the project tags (mentioned above).  I like a timeline viewer,  where I can search or specify the date,  but they are certainly more difficult to create.  I could imagine others being interested in statistics surrounding their activity, like how long they are on certain sites etc. 

Some additional ideas:

-Prompted input:  A popup or sound indicating an event was just logged, with the option to add or annotate events with predefined tags or notes.  So for instance, if a file was saved  or modified, being able to quickly enter in some details about that. 
-Events can trigger other actions.
-Utilizing metadata as much as possible
-Merge or somehow sync histories from different computers systems.  (i.e work and personal or old pc and new pc and maybe the possibility of adding some sort of input from a smartphone.  Adding a smartphone is another hurdle, but if there was a simple app that allowed you to make a note of say, a phone call or a meeting, that could then be exported and then imported into the log/history.
-Notes: Ability to create structured and unstructured notes to add context.
- Export a segment of the history based on filters
-If there are notes related to an activity, perhaps having those notes display when you engage in this activity again.
-Perhaps being able to import comma delineated or text files logs from elsewhere.

Those are some thoughts, but I guess what I am curious about is what information it is possible to capture from the system automatically?

Note this incredible review page for online bases.

Online Filemaker alternatives: Coda, Zoho, AppSheet, AppGyver, and more
Maria Korolov
https://www.mariakor...emaker-alternatives/

« Last Edit: Today at 08:20 AM by Steven Avery »

-Steven Avery (March 10, 2021, 07:20 AM)

That is an impressive list.   Verry impressive.

When I think of flat, I think of plain text or as close to it as possible.   I avoid hosted SAAS solutions but I get I get the appeal of of these.

An airtable alternative that is open source is baserow. https://baserow.io/
https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow
I believe I have seen some similar products that use a git as the backend as well.

I have had my eye on anytype which has a similar look to notion.  After making a big splash there was some silence, but it seems to have picked up production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hblHWfXA3XU

Good luck on your search.

What a great application.  Tried this out for a number of hours and it worked really well.  I was toggling between Email, a Word processing document and the browser. My use case was keeping a somewhat searchable visual log of what I had done/was doing.

The only issue I ran into was when deleting the images from the internal screenshot browser. I needed to back out of the folder containing the images I had deleted and then navigate back in for the image thumbnails to disappear.

I figured I would leave a few quick comments and thoughts.  I put some thoughts in this thread already regarding more file/window context in the filename. Add window title to custom naming

I think that for my use case, having program specific profiles for capture would be useful.  When I am in the word processing program, I do not need as frequent captures.  In fact captures based on pixel difference seemed enough.  When in my email client I could see it being helpful to capture only emails that had been opened in a new window or that I was replying/forwarding or composing.  If it is possible to utilize the windows title like mentioned in the other thread,  then I wonder if it would be possible  to only screen capture windows with "re:" or "fwd:" or some other keyword in the window name, as that would limit the number of captures when working in the email client. I imagine that having application specific capture profiles could be difficult to implement. What might be easier is having different profiles and being able to switch between them with a hot key.

I really liked the capture when shifting the focus window, but with the task I was doing,  it resulted in many unneeded captures. I wonder if it would be possible to set to not capture with a focus change, IF  a focus change capture was made within a certain amount of time, or IF a focus change was made between two specific applications within a certain time?

Having captures during certain events might also be helpful.  Like when saving a file.  It would be important to capture after the input, so perhaps using the pixel compare to wait until a certain number of characters were input before doing the capture?

When browsing web pages, there just was not a way I see to make screen captures work better.  Having a separate profile might help.  Maybe turning off captures when if scrolling? I have a scroll button on my mouse :D

I also wish there was a way of choosing the frame of a specific window, to cut out the stuff I really dd not need for my uses. So for instance,  the menu bar and tool bar on the word processor and in the email compose client.  I do not think there is a way to auto select the inner most frame.   I did see the user could define a specific area to be captured. Which is a way to make this work.


If someone were using this to audit their time, I could see it being helpful to add a "project" tag and be able to apply that tag to the captures being collected. 

Again. Really cool application.