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A Geek’s Best Friend has returned!

· 3 min read
Martijn Smit

WhatPulse 2.2

After a hiatus of a few months, the Geek Window is back and better than ever. With the ease of drag and drop you can drop in any stat you want. You can also choose its color, font size and transparency. Here’s how the default looks:

Application statistics

Per application statistics have made their way into 2.x, but there was no way to tell how much you used a certain application globally, just per computer locally. That has now changed!

There is a new option in 2.2 (“Upload application info” — currently disabled by default) which will allow you to send the local per application statistics to the website, where you can check your global application usage!

We are really excited about this feature, as this is a great way to gain insight into your total computer experience. There will be more awesome stuff coming, so be sure to enable that “Upload application info” setting!

Activity Tracking Made Easy with WhatPulse Statistics

Website Privacy

The new application statistics are presented on the website inside your profile page. To make sure you can control your own public visibility, Privacy Settings have been put into place. These privacy controls allows you to choose what information you show on your public profile. Hide a single application from public view, hide just your pulses or make your entire profile private, it’s up to you!

Other Changes

Above are the major changes for 2.2 — but that’s not all! There are a few more things we’d like to share with you:

  • Added a setting to disable pulsing upon a double click of the tray icon.

  • Mouse heat map now displays in proper screen ratio.

  • The tray icon menu has been changed to be more useful.

  • Allow applications to be ignored for input as well.

  • Allow network traffic measurements without the third-party libraries (WinPcap, libpcap). NOTE: Without these libraries, the client will not pulse network traffic to the website.

  • Windows: Added a crash reporter which will report any issues back to us and notify you of the problem.

  • Apple OS X: Use the built-in notification center, if available.

  • Fixed auto pulsing with keys; it pulsed the current keys, not the set value.

  • Fixed IPv6 network traffic measurements.

  • Fixed keyboard heat map counting of navigation keys (arrows, home, page up, etc) on some computers.

  • General Interface and Performance optimisations, 2.2 uses less memory/CPU and the interface has a better experience.

  • Improve database backups to be less intrusive (disk I/O) and be a lot faster.

You can download the new client here — or you can use the updater.

Other Website Changes

The website has been updated to complement the 2.2 release, centering mostly around the application statistics and privacy settings. But there are other things we’d like to tell you about!

  • The Dynamic Images have been updated for the new 2.x statistics (yes, long overdue!).

  • Favorites have been replaced with Followers. Follow a user directly from their profile page and see who is following you.

  • The ability to hide specific applications from your profile.

  • Fix “double push” on header buttons (My Team/My Stats).