Logging user activity
TimeCache can track all your activity on your computer. This can come in handy to put together a complete picture of what documents you worked on in which applications throughout the day.

To use activity tracking, first turn it on in TimeCache Preferences. You will also need to activate Universal Access in OS X's System Preferences if it is not already enabled. (TimeCache can do it for you when you turn on activity tracking in TimeCache Preferences.

The User Activity window
The User Activity window can show you every window activated throughout the day

Once activity logging is turned on, TimeCache adds entries to its User Activity window based on your settings in TimeCache Preferences. You can show the Activity log by choosing View>Activity Window. Each listing includes the application name, window name, start time, stop time, and elapsed time. TimeCache continues to add entries to the log until you quit TimeCache or turn off activity logging.

Saving activity as Daily Log entries
TimeCache lets you save one or more listings in the User activity window as a Daily Log entry. To do so, select all the User activity listings you want included in one Daily Log entry (by clicking, Shift-clicking, or ⌘-clicking listings). You may want to first sort listings by application or window name. In order to do so, just click the appropriate column header at the top of the User activity list. Then click Create Entry to begin the process of creating a Daily Log entry. TimeCache prompts you for the name of a project/matter to bill the time to, as well as a billing category to use. You are also given the opportunity to add a descriptive note. If you provide a project and billing category, TimeCache totals the elapsed time for each of the selected lines and applies that to your Daily Log entry.

Saving a log of your activity
TimeCache can save your activity tracking data to a tab-delimited file for further analysis in other applications. You can either set TimeCache Preferences to save all entries automatically, or you can click Export in the User Activity window to save its contents to a file. TimeCache also gives you the option of going directly to the User Activity Tracking panel of TimeCache Preferences to change the log file by clicking the Set Log File button. If you set up TimeCache Preferences to automatically export user activity to a log file, you can set an option to generate a new log file for each day.

TimeCache saves the same information you see in the User Activity window, with the addition of dates included with start and stop times, and the total number of seconds for each line in a separate field of its own. This last item allows you to more easily total your overall time in another application if desired. TimeCache uses your text encoding setting for exporting reports for saving activity logs.

You can export only selected list entries by first selecting those rows you want to export, and then holding down the Option key on your keyboard. When you move the mouse over the Export button, its title changes to Export Selected. Clicking it in this state saves only the highlighted rows.

TimeCache saves these files with a file extension of "tcalog" in order to allow loading logs (see next paragraph). You can view these log files in other applications by dragging them over an application's Finder icon or Dock icon. Alternatively, you can change the "tcalog" extension to "txt" in the Finder to enable opening them with a double-click.

Loading a previously saved log
You can load entries that were saved in a log file back into the User activity window by clicking Load log and locating the file on your hard drive.

If you want to clear the entries from the User Activity window, click Clear and confirm that you want to delete all entries when prompted.