193 posts tagged with "product-updates"

If you've ever looked at your global WhatPulse rank and calculated how many years it would take to catch the person at the top, you'll understand why I built Leagues. More than two decades of keys and clicks make for some impressive lifetime totals. They also make for a rather long head start.

WhatPulse Leagues are here. Your everyday computer activity now gives you a weekly competition: a small group of opponents, a promotion line to aim for, and a fresh round every Monday. Keep using WhatPulse and pulsing normally. Your keys and clicks do the rest.

Until now, the WhatPulse API was mostly a personal thing. You created an API key, pointed a script or a dashboard at your own account, and that was that. Useful, but it stopped the moment you wanted to build something for other people.

That changes with OAuth applications. Any WhatPulse user can now sign in to your app, approve what it is allowed to see, and your app gets an access token to call the API on their behalf. It is the same authorization code flow you know from "Sign in with GitHub" or "Sign in with Google", so if you have done that before, you already know most of it.

WhatPulse 6.3 is built around one idea: more depth in application visibility, and giving you a faster, cleaner way to see it. The headline changes are window title tracking, a redesigned tray popup, and Pulsar - a fun new desktop avatar - alongside a tidied-up Settings screen and a substantial round of stability and correctness work.

See your time and input per window title​

WhatPulse has always tracked how long you spend in each application. With 6.3 it goes one level deeper and tracks per window title, so you can see not just "2 hours in your Excel or IDE" but which sheets and projects made up those two hours - and the same for your input.

• Time and input per title. Your uptime is broken down by window title alongside the usual per-app totals, and keys, clicks, scrolls, distance, and words are attributed to the title they happened in.
• Expand and search. On the applications pages, click any app to reveal the titles you spent the most time in. A search box lets you find a title across all your apps at once - even ones you have not expanded - and your search stays put as the stats refresh in the background.

There are a few new things happening around WhatPulse in the last few weeks, ranging from long-requested quality-of-life improvements to an early preview of something much bigger. There are new community guidelines, and the privacy policy has been updated. Here's a rundown of everything:

Create and sync profiles across your computers​

If you use Profiles to track projects, clients, study sessions, or different types of work, this update should make life a lot easier. You can now create and manage your Profiles directly on the website, and your WhatPulse desktop apps will automatically sync them.

No more manually recreating the same profile on every computer. Create it once, and start tracking time towards it everywhere.

Watch the demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YF1tkYfQVw

Preview: Meet Pulsar, your data analyst​

For years, WhatPulse has been collecting detailed statistics about how you use your computer. Keystrokes, applications, websites, uptime, productivity habits, rankings - there's a lot of data in there.

The problem is that charts and dashboards don't always tell you what the data actually means. That's where Pulsar comes in 👇

(click to zoom in)

Pulsar is a new data analyst built directly into your WhatPulse dashboard. You can ask questions about your stats in plain English, and Pulsar will analyze your data and answer in seconds.

A few examples:

• “When am I most productive during the day?”
• “How does this week compare to last week?”
• “Which websites took the biggest chunk of my time?”
• “Show me my peak typing hours.”
• “How has my productivity changed over the last three months?”

It also understands follow-up questions naturally. Ask “which days were strongest?” after a weekly summary, and it'll know what you mean.

Built with privacy in mind​

Pulsar is designed around the same privacy-first approach as the rest of WhatPulse. You control exactly what Pulsar can access through separate permission toggles for: Activity summaries, Application usage, Website usage, Computer details.

Disable a category, and Pulsar simply cannot query that data. By default, Pulsar doesn't have any access until you explicitly grant it, and you can revoke permissions at any time. Pulsar also doesn't check any of your data until you ask it a question, so it's not analyzing anything in the background without your knowledge.

Available now in preview​

Pulsar is currently rolling out as a preview feature while I continue improving, potty-training it and learning what kinds of questions people actually want answered. During the preview, there's a monthly message allowance that resets on the 1st of each month.

Long term, Pulsar will likely become part of a separate WhatPulse Insights plan with higher usage limits, while still keeping some form of preview access available for existing users. I'm still figuring out the right balance there and seeing how much it costs for us to run. For now, I'd love for you to try it and share what you think.

Try Pulsar here: https://whatpulse.org/dashboard/insights

New community guidelines​

The WhatPulse community has grown a lot over the years, and with more interaction between users, competitions, leagues, reviews, and community features on the way, it felt like the right time to formalize some clear community guidelines.

There have always been rules around fairness and cheating on the leaderboards, but the new guidelines expand on that and also set expectations for how we keep the community welcoming and enjoyable for everyone.

You can read the full guidelines here.

Privacy policy updates​

I've also updated the privacy policy to reflect newer features like Web Insights and the AI provider used for Pulsar Insights.

As always, privacy remains a core part of how WhatPulse is designed. The updated policy clarifies what data is collected, how it's processed, and where third-party services are involved.

You can read the updated privacy policy here.

I've just released WhatPulse v6.2, and it adds a few long-requested feature: word counting!

The headlines are word counting, a pause toggle for data collection, and a redesigned input history page. Beyond that, there are various UI tweaks, a new proxy configuration option in the login wizard, native Wayland support on Linux, and a handful of bug fixes.

Details below:

Word counting​

WhatPulse now tracks how many words you type, without ever storing the text. Word counts are inferred from keystroke patterns: word boundaries are detected from key events (spaces, punctuation, enter, etc.), corrections like backspace and delete are handled, and IME input methods are supported. Everything is processed locally and only the numeric counts are kept.

You'll see word counts on the overview tab, input history page, per-application stats, website stats (via the browser extension), exports, and the Geek Window. The feature is on by default and respects your existing keyboard and per-application tracking settings. New Geek Window variables (TotalWords, TodayWords) and Client API fields are available.

Pause data collection​

There are moments when you don't want WhatPulse watching — a benchmark, a stress test, a colleague typing on your machine, or just because. The new pause toggle in the tray popup stops collection until you resume it.

While paused, the status bar pill turns orange with an explanatory tooltip, the overview tab shows an amber banner with a one-click "Resume collecting" button, and the stats grid in the tray popup grays out behind an overlay so you know exactly what's going on. Activity that happens during the pause is dropped rather than buffered, so resuming doesn't retroactively log the paused-period input or bandwidth. The pause is intentionally runtime-only and resets when WhatPulse restarts.

Redesigned input history page​

The input history page has been rebuilt with a new look and better usability:

• Grouped bar chart with interactive legend: Click series in the legend to show/hide them. Hidden series free up bar width for the remaining ones. Your legend preferences are remembered across sessions.
• Flexible time periods: Replaced the fixed period dropdowns with the same time period selector used on the uptime page: today through all-time, plus custom date ranges.
• Group by hour, day, week, month or year: A new group-by control lets you zoom in or out on your typing and clicking trends. The default grouping is chosen automatically based on the time period you're viewing, and you can override it at any time.

Configure a proxy from the login wizard​

Users behind a corporate proxy can now configure their connection before logging in. A new "Configure proxy..." button on the login and activation pages opens a dedicated proxy dialog, so first-time setup no longer requires reaching the Settings tab (which is only available after authentication).

Native Wayland support on Linux​

The Linux AppImage now runs natively on Wayland instead of falling back to X11 compatibility mode. This should improve display scaling, input handling, and overall integration on modern Linux desktops running Wayland.

Smaller UI improvements​

• Status bar actions: Reset and Export buttons have moved from individual tab pages into the shared status bar at the bottom. They update based on the active page, freeing up vertical space on every stats page. The export button is now consistently located across the app, and the reset button is less likely to be accidentally clicked.
• New animated toggle: A shiny animated pill toggle replaces the previous mix of buttons and dropdowns for switching between chart and data views, giving a more consistent look across the app.

Fixed​

• Fixed proxy settings not persisting between sessions; changes made in Settings > Proxy now save correctly and apply immediately without a restart.
• Windows: Fixed a high CPU usage issue that could occur on startup when running as administrator.
• Windows: Fixed mouse heatmap clustering on displays with DPI scaling, where clicks in the right and bottom portions of the screen were dropped or misattributed to the wrong monitor.
• Windows: Improved detection of application version information, especially for games and smaller tools that don't include full version metadata.
• Fixed the application sync window sorting by "last used" — it was sorting alphabetically on the text (e.g. "22 hours" before "3 days") instead of by actual date.
• Fixed being able to open the FAQ window by clicking on empty space in the row instead of the actual text.

How to update​

You can upgrade by using the "Check for Updates" option inside the app, or grab WhatPulse from the Downloads page.

Happy pulsing!

— Martijn & the WhatPulse team