#whatpulse

Hmm seems kinda low, I'm pretty sure I downloaded more than that.

Oh. OOooooh. I stopped using WhatPulse in May. That's why

After installation, the first thing that you need to do is create an account. You can sign up using your email or you could simply log in using your Facebook account. Then, the next thing to do is complete the details and then add a computer. Just create a new computer name for your laptop/desktop. This feature is there so that you can track the usage of your multiple computers with a single account.

After setting everything up, you will find that this program runs in the task bar of your system. You will find a "W" icon there. What this program does is it silently records the following things:

Key Presses: Number of keys pressed on your keyboard.

Mouse Clicks: Number of mouse clicks or touchpad button clicks.

Bandwidth: Measures and records your download and upload bandwidth.

Uptime: The total time that your computer has been running for.

Do not worry as this program is NOT a keylogger that records your key presses in the order they were pressed. It just records the number of times they were pressed. I've used it for around 7 years+ and I trust this program.

Features

Pulsing and Online Features

Your recorded key presses can then be "pulsed", meaning that the number is uploaded online to the whatpulse.org website. This is done so as to secure the number of key presses forever and also to share the statistics online with everyone. Mouse clicks, bandwidth consumption and uptime is also pulsed to the online server.

Once you pulse your stats, the current recorded stats are reset to 0 and your accumulated numbers are added to the total. You can pulse by clicking on the task bar WhatPulse icon twice or by clicking on the Pulse button in the main program window.

You can find the pulsed information in your profile online. By the way, my profile URL is: www.whatpulse.org/gamesnepal. In your profile URL, you can find the statistics such as your total pulses, keys, clicks, download, upload and uptime. You can also find your pulse history which shows the details of the individual pulses you've made separately. You can always share your profile and statistics link with anyone.

Using the pulse history feature, you can view the statistics for a date range and different computers. Your profile also displays a "Computer name" field which separates the statistics according to the different machines you've configured it for.

In your online profile, you can also click on the wrench like button which says "View standard profile". Clicking on it will display the total accumulated statistics for your entire profile and you get the overview of your stats and rankings. For example at the moment a portion of my standard profile reads

gamesnepal has registered a WhatPulse account on 2007-09-05. Since then, gamesnepal has typed 45,650,000 keys, clicked their mouse 10,211,498 times, downloaded 1.02TB, uploaded 163.61GB and has run the WhatPulse client for 45 weeks, 6 days, 11 hours, 25 minutes, 8 seconds.

Rankings and Statistics

The online records also rank you according to your statistics. Using this information you can see where you rank among global WhatPulse members for key strokes, mouse clicks, downloads, uploads and uptime. For example: I rank 767th in terms of keys and 3047 when it comes to click—thanks to my job as a freelance writer and transcriptionist—the numbers are high.

Countries

While signing up for WhatPulse, you select a country you're from and that is used to calculate the total keyboard, mouse and computer usage statistics for an entire country. Countries are also ranked based on their statistics.

Currently, you'll find United States is the top ranked country by key presses, downloads and uptimes. It also has the most members contributing to its high ranking.

Teams

Teams are similar to countries but they are user created. You can join any team of your choice. Most teams are open while some teams require a password to join; so they are invite only. The total accumulated statistics for teams are also ranked.

Right now, the number 1 team team is "Dutch Power Cows" with the highest number of keys, clicks and members. You'll find my team "Reddit" in the 10-11 spot.

Other Features

Keyboard Heatmap

This is a feature in WhatPulse that shows us additional details about our key presses. We can switch to the "Input" tab in the software to find this feature. Using this feature, you can see how many times the individual keys have been pressed and find out the most used keys.

Mouse Heatmap

In the "Input" tab if you press the right arrow button on the program itself, you will see a mouse heatmap which looks sort of cool. It displays which areas of your screen you've hovered and clicked your mouse the most. It color codes this information so that looks cool to view.

Input

Once cool feature of this app is that you can find how many key strokes and clicks you have made using different software and program in your machine. So you can actually see the stats of the number of keys you've typed in Google Chrome or MS Word for example. You can also view these by day, week, month(s), year and all time.

Network

WhatPulse is also useful in showing your current download and upload speed. I use the "Network" tab of this program to view my connection speed at all times. Using this tab, you can exactly tell when your internet is not working up to its capacity. I find this feature pretty useful.

Others

You can also find tons of simple features in the remaining tabs of the software. For example: You can set up automatic pulsing—if you want your statistics to be sent online—when you reach a certain number of key strokes.

Premium Features

There are also premium features that provide the members to track additional details. These aren't really required but opt-in to become a premium member if you are a statistics nerd and you want to support the developer. The cost is just $2/month for this feature.

Overall Remarks

WhatPulse is a simple software with statistical features that won't blow your mind, but it is fun to record your stats and share them with friends and other people. It is not available for smartphones and I don't think it will ever be. But for PC/Mac/Linux users, this is the program to choose for recording, viewing and sharing some basic usage statistics.