Now that we are sitting on a much improved server setup, let’s get back to what really matters, Slife and Slifeshare. Slife 1.1 is almost ready, so I thought it would be fun to give you an idea of what we are working on and thinking of.

The big feature in version 1.1 is that it will offer support for *any* app. Yep, you heard that right, Slife 1.1 will be able to track usage of any application! Here’s the story. For some applications like Safari and Mail, Slife can observe ‘when’ you use the app and also ‘how’. In this case, ‘how’ means obtaining additional info from the app, such as getting the title of the web page you are visiting, the subject of the message you are reading or the name of the document you are working on. Slife 1.1 will be able to track the ‘whens’ and ‘hows’ of more than 40 apps. Here’s the list we have so far, in no specific order:

WriteRoom, VoodooPad, TeXShop, Smultron, BBEdit, TextMate, Word, TextEdit, TextWrangler, Safari, Firefox, Flock, Opera, OmniWeb, Shiira, Camino, Mail.app, Entourage, Thunderbird, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, OmniGraffle, Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote, OmniOutliner, OmniOutliner Pro, OmniPlan, iChat, Adium, Snak, iTunes, iPhoto, RealPlayer, QuickTime Player, GarageBand, iDVD, NetNewsWire, Vienna, endo, Transmit, MarsEdit

What about for apps from which Slife can’t get any additional info? Well, as long as the app is within the Applications folder, Slife will be able to talk to it. If Slife can’t obtain any information for the app (lots of apps out there are not scriptable unfortunately), then Slife only records how much time you spent using it, which is fine for a lot of purposes – your activities will still end up in the visualizations, taken into account in the summary view, etc. It’s really cool!

In additional to bug fixes and small tweaks here and there, Slife 1.1 will also offer an Export feature. It will let you save your interactions with your apps in an XML file, and then it’s up to you to decide what to do with it – you might want to save it, create visualizations around it, analyze it, pass it on to other services, other apps, etc.

There is one final important point about the 1.1 release. After being under development for more than a year, we have decided that this might the time to start charging for the app. The plan would be to continue offering Slife for free, but you would have to register (probably around $35) in order to track more than, say 3 applications at a time. This would ensure that anyone would still be able to have fun with the app (and Slifeshare), while we would be in a great position to continue developing Slife and a whole bunch of other stuff we have in the works.

Anyways, we are very pleased with this upcoming release and we think you will like it too! We are planning to get it out of the door around Mid-May.