194 posts tagged with "product-updates"

We're making a few changes to WhatPulse Leagues, starting this week. The final sprint is now exactly 48 hours, results now lock on Monday afternoon instead of at midnight, and Pulse Score has a new name: League Score. Here's what's changing and why.

The final sprint is now 48 hours​

The final sprint used to start on Friday at 18:00 CET. It now starts at midnight between Friday and Saturday, so it covers exactly the weekend. As before, rival scores are hidden during the sprint while positions stay live. You'll know where you stand, just not by how much.

Results now lock on Monday at 14:00 CET​

Until now, a round was finalized right after Sunday ended in Europe. That was too early for some players.

The WhatPulse app sends your stats in the background, and they don't always arrive straight away. A computer might have been offline for a while, or a slow connection might delay the upload. Stats from the last hours of the week could reach us after the round was already locked, and they never counted.

To fix this, every app now has until Monday 14:00 CET to send its stats for the week. Then the results lock.

To be clear about what this means:

• Only Monday to Sunday counts. The extra time is only for stats from the week that just ended to arrive. Nothing you do on Monday counts toward the previous round.
• Monday's activity counts toward the new round. That's how it always worked, and it still does, even before your new group appears.
• Your week follows your own computer's clock. It runs from Monday to Sunday in your local time, so every timezone gets the same seven days.

What you'll see on Monday morning​

Between Sunday midnight and Monday 14:00 CET, your league is in its photo finish. Scores stay hidden, the standings are marked as provisional, and a countdown shows when the results lock. Positions can still change as late stats arrive.

At 14:00 CET your results are final. Promotions, relegations and your new group arrive together, followed by your weekly email.

Pulse Score is now League Score​

The name Pulse Score caused confusion. It sounded as if the score came from your pulses, but it doesn't. It's calculated from the hourly stats the WhatPulse app records, the same data behind your overview and productivity dashboards.

So we've renamed it League Score. Only the name changes; the calculation stays the same:

▎ League Score = keys + clicks × 3

The same goes for your existing scores, ranks and history. If you show your score on your profile, you can now use %LeagueScore%.

Why your score doesn't change when you pulse​

This is the question we hear most. Your League Score isn't updated the moment you pulse. Leagues are recalculated once an hour, on the hour, from the stats your app has sent. New activity shows up at the next update. Your league page shows when that is.

In short​

The full rules are on the Leagues page (https://whatpulse.org/leagues). Good luck this weekend.

If you've ever looked at your global WhatPulse rank and calculated how many years it would take to catch the person at the top, you'll understand why I built Leagues. More than two decades of keys and clicks make for some impressive lifetime totals. They also make for a rather long head start.

WhatPulse Leagues are here. Your everyday computer activity now gives you a weekly competition: a small group of opponents, a promotion line to aim for, and a fresh round every Monday. Keep using WhatPulse and pulsing normally. Your keys and clicks do the rest.

Until now, the WhatPulse API was mostly a personal thing. You created an API key, pointed a script or a dashboard at your own account, and that was that. Useful, but it stopped the moment you wanted to build something for other people.

That changes with OAuth applications. Any WhatPulse user can now sign in to your app, approve what it is allowed to see, and your app gets an access token to call the API on their behalf. It is the same authorization code flow you know from "Sign in with GitHub" or "Sign in with Google", so if you have done that before, you already know most of it.

WhatPulse 6.3 is built around one idea: more depth in application visibility, and giving you a faster, cleaner way to see it. The headline changes are window title tracking, a redesigned tray popup, and Pulsar - a fun new desktop avatar - alongside a tidied-up Settings screen and a substantial round of stability and correctness work.

See your time and input per window title​

WhatPulse has always tracked how long you spend in each application. With 6.3 it goes one level deeper and tracks per window title, so you can see not just "2 hours in your Excel or IDE" but which sheets and projects made up those two hours - and the same for your input.

• Time and input per title. Your uptime is broken down by window title alongside the usual per-app totals, and keys, clicks, scrolls, distance, and words are attributed to the title they happened in.
• Expand and search. On the applications pages, click any app to reveal the titles you spent the most time in. A search box lets you find a title across all your apps at once - even ones you have not expanded - and your search stays put as the stats refresh in the background.

There are a few new things happening around WhatPulse in the last few weeks, ranging from long-requested quality-of-life improvements to an early preview of something much bigger. There are new community guidelines, and the privacy policy has been updated. Here's a rundown of everything:

Create and sync profiles across your computers​

If you use Profiles to track projects, clients, study sessions, or different types of work, this update should make life a lot easier. You can now create and manage your Profiles directly on the website, and your WhatPulse desktop apps will automatically sync them.

No more manually recreating the same profile on every computer. Create it once, and start tracking time towards it everywhere.

Watch the demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YF1tkYfQVw

Preview: Meet Pulsar, your data analyst​

For years, WhatPulse has been collecting detailed statistics about how you use your computer. Keystrokes, applications, websites, uptime, productivity habits, rankings - there's a lot of data in there.

The problem is that charts and dashboards don't always tell you what the data actually means. That's where Pulsar comes in 👇

(click to zoom in)

Pulsar is a new data analyst built directly into your WhatPulse dashboard. You can ask questions about your stats in plain English, and Pulsar will analyze your data and answer in seconds.

A few examples:

• “When am I most productive during the day?”
• “How does this week compare to last week?”
• “Which websites took the biggest chunk of my time?”
• “Show me my peak typing hours.”
• “How has my productivity changed over the last three months?”

It also understands follow-up questions naturally. Ask “which days were strongest?” after a weekly summary, and it'll know what you mean.

Built with privacy in mind​

Pulsar is designed around the same privacy-first approach as the rest of WhatPulse. You control exactly what Pulsar can access through separate permission toggles for: Activity summaries, Application usage, Website usage, Computer details.

Disable a category, and Pulsar simply cannot query that data. By default, Pulsar doesn't have any access until you explicitly grant it, and you can revoke permissions at any time. Pulsar also doesn't check any of your data until you ask it a question, so it's not analyzing anything in the background without your knowledge.

Available now in preview​

Pulsar is currently rolling out as a preview feature while I continue improving, potty-training it and learning what kinds of questions people actually want answered. During the preview, there's a monthly message allowance that resets on the 1st of each month.

Long term, Pulsar will likely become part of a separate WhatPulse Insights plan with higher usage limits, while still keeping some form of preview access available for existing users. I'm still figuring out the right balance there and seeing how much it costs for us to run. For now, I'd love for you to try it and share what you think.

Try Pulsar here: https://whatpulse.org/dashboard/insights

New community guidelines​

The WhatPulse community has grown a lot over the years, and with more interaction between users, competitions, leagues, reviews, and community features on the way, it felt like the right time to formalize some clear community guidelines.

There have always been rules around fairness and cheating on the leaderboards, but the new guidelines expand on that and also set expectations for how we keep the community welcoming and enjoyable for everyone.

You can read the full guidelines here.

Privacy policy updates​

I've also updated the privacy policy to reflect newer features like Web Insights and the AI provider used for Pulsar Insights.

As always, privacy remains a core part of how WhatPulse is designed. The updated policy clarifies what data is collected, how it's processed, and where third-party services are involved.

You can read the updated privacy policy here.