Fixes "unknown" being returned when some apps open #64
Conversation
I've been developing an electron application, and noticed that ActivityWatch regularly logged the window as unknown. From research, it seems that some applications aren't "scriptable" according to JXA/applescript, and so you can't get their attributes or properties, which was leading the original script to fail at executing both when setting mainWindow and later when setting title. This meant that everything for that window was recorded as unknown. To fix this, I first try to get the window the old way, and if this fails then to get the name of the frontmost window as the title. This works very well, it seems to get appName and title accurately, and avoids failing to execute and getting Unknown app names.
On Mac, you can have an application open without a window. This edge-case previously caused an error meaning time wasn't tracked. I'm not 100% that a title of "No window" is the right approach, but it is the clearest description of what's happening I can see right now.
|
The code has become slightly uglier to account for Applications where there are no open windows. Let me know whether you prefer just one comment to explain the new try-catch, or a comment in each place. |
| url = Application(appName).documents[0].url(); | ||
| title = Application(appName).documents[0].name(); | ||
| title = Application(appName).documents[0].name(); |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Please try to keep whitespace consistent (2 spaces for indentation, no end-of-line spaces)
| // You can also have safari open with just a Devtools window, meaning no documents | ||
| // This edge-case previously caused an error meaning time wasn't tracked. | ||
| // I'm not 100% that a title of "No window" is the right approach, but it is the clearest description of what's happening I can see right now. | ||
| title = "No window" |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I think a single comment is fine, but perhaps lift out the "No window" constant into a variable, and document the behavior by the declaration/first use?
|
This solves the issues I'm having with RStudio on macOS. What's the best way to move forward? |
|
This PR might not be needed if all goes well with the new default Swift-method #68, just released in v0.12.1 Thanks for your hard work on this @michaeljelly, but looks like there was different way that seems to work a lot better. |
I've been developing an electron application, and noticed that ActivityWatch regularly logged the window as unknown. From research, it seems that some applications aren't "scriptable" according to JXA/applescript, and so you can't get their attributes or properties, which was leading the original script to fail at executing both when setting mainWindow and later when setting title. This meant that everything for that window was recorded as unknown.
To fix this, I first try to get the window the old way, and if this fails then to get the name of the frontmost window as the title. This works very well, it seems to get appName and title accurately, and avoids failing to execute and getting Unknown app names.
Hope this helps!