Originally downloaded 3/20/06. Is there a category for a product like Onlife? Not that I know of. BackTrack stores all the keystrokes you type, and there are a variety of tools that store all the web pages you visit. But nothing that does that plus all of your mail, chats, etc. Sounds very interesting indeed! Did I mention that this is freeware?
Update 12/19/06. I’ve let onLife run freely on my system for weeks at a time on two or three occasions since I downloaded beta 3 in March. I still think this is a very cool concept, and the visuals and interface ideas are really terrific. There’s even been a slow but steady increase in support for more apps, but honestly I haven’t yet found a reason why I would use onLife. The one thing I kind of hoped to get out of it was an alternative safety net to retrieve lost text and the like. However, early on I discovered that onLife doesn’t preserve information you type into web forms.
Part of the issue for me is that like many “discover yourself” applications, onLife requires a lot of setup to be really useful. If you take the time to set up projects, and then remember to tell onLife you’re switching to a given project, you might come away with some useful data about your activities. But I’m not sure what I’d do with it, quite frankly. I’d rather take the time to set up projects in an Personal Organizer application like LifeBalance (which I haven’t had time to do) than go through a similar exercise in onLife.
And despite the increase in supported applications, there are still quite a few that I use regularly that aren’t being captured in onLife. Right off the top of my head, I can think of DevonThink Pro and Ecto, both of which I use heavily in blogging and doing research. Newer apps like WriteRoom, of course, won’t be supported for months (if ever). A tool like onLife needs a whole gang of open source coders devoted to making it really useful… or else, they need to turn it into a money-maker so they can hire someone else. Heck, there hasn’t been any change of significance to the software since May, and the developer said recently that the next version would be trimming back features rather than adding them.
Bottom line, if onLife’s life-cycle regains some energy I’ll be the first to notice and take another look. In the meantime, I’m tossing this aside and closing the loop on this demo.
Version as tested: 1.0b5.
