What's new with WhatPulse?

Meet Focused Uptime

We've always tracked how long your computer has been on and which apps have been active, but 5.11 introduces something new: Focused Uptime.

This new metric shows you how long you've actively used your computer. Not just when it was on in the background. It gives a clearer picture of the time you've truly spent in front of the screen. Perfect for anyone curious about their productivity or just how much focus time they're putting in.

🛠 Quality of life improvements

Alongside focused uptime, this release includes a batch of refinements:

• Significant performance boost when using the app, opening the window is now much snappier. We've done this by loading only the interface parts you need, when you need them - instead of everything at once (which was the case).
• More accurate application usage: we're not using milliseconds to count instead of seconds. This improves the precision with a few minutes per day.
• A fresh, unified look: the whole app now uses the same font as the website, making everything feel more cohesive.
• Small cleanup: fixed a typo in the setup wizard ("metwork" → "network"). Thanks, MischaP!

⚡ Upgrade to 5.11 and see how much of your uptime is really focused time.

To keep the leaderboards consistent and transparent, participation now requires a public profile. That means your username and main stats need to be visible.

If your profile was private but you were on the leaderboards, the "Include me in public rankings" setting has been turned off. Want back in? Just make your profile public again.

You can still use the privacy settings to hide specific parts of your profile if you’d like. Only the basics (username + main stats) need to stay public for leaderboard participation.

Another round of pages has made the jump to the new website look! You’ll now find the updated design on:

• All leaderboard pages (keyboard/mouse, network, uptime, referrals)
• Teams and Countries leaderboards, and their profile pages
• About, Privacy Policy, Grand Totals page, and other misc pages

With these updates, most of the public-facing stats are now polished up. Only a handful of pages are left before the full site is refreshed.

We’ve just moved another batch of dashboard pages to the new website design! You’ll now see the new layout on:

• Computer & Profile settings
• Applications overview
• Online Backups
• Heatmap settings
• Weekly Reports archive

With these done, about 80% of the dashboard has now made the switch. The entire dashboard will be done in a few weeks - then the public statistics pages are up next.

This update brings a few quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, and under-the-hood changes to improve stability and future compatibility.

🪄 Improvements

• The setup wizard now has its own window, making the setup and main interface simpler.
• The Geek Window stats %TotalDistance% and %TotalScrolls% now reflect account totals correctly, not just the current computer’s stats.
• The network time series for computers with multiple interfaces has been fixed to sum the data correctly, ensuring accurate historical data. This applies to the time series currently used in the Discord leaderboards.
• Fixed a few memory leaks when opening the main window repeatedly, which will slightly reduce memory usage over time.
• Fixed a few possible crashes when exiting WhatPulse with the main window still open. You were closing WhatPulse anyway, so these weren’t really a problem—but still worth fixing.

WhatPulse Professional updates

• Improved compatibility for Nuance PowerScribe.
• Streamlined the Professional interface by removing buttons that only apply to the Community version (such as share buttons, online profile link, change password, etc.).
• Clicking "Open Online Stats" now takes you to your Dashboard for a more integrated experience.
• The release notes link now points to the new whatpulse.pro/releasenotes page when there's a new version.

WhatPulse 5.10.1 is a patch release for 5.10, mainly fixing an issue where the app's database log file was growing a "bit" too much on some computers.

🔧 Improvements

• Re-enabled sending bug reports with incidents (only if the "Send bug and usage reports" option is enabled). This was disabled for a few releases while we got our backend up and running again, but we can now learn more about issues WhatPulse encounters outside of internal testing and beta periods—which will help us squash more bugs!
• Removed a few unnecessary logging statements that were filling up the log file.
• Updated the embedded SQLite3 version to improve performance and reduce the size of the database log file.
• Improved a few German translations, thanks to Cheesesus.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Updated Qt to 6.9.1, which fixes an error on Windows 10 version 1607 and earlier (from 2016) related to "Qt6Core.dll". Even though WhatPulse still works, please consider upgrading your Windows version anyway.
• Fixed a crash that could occur in certain scenarios with slow internet connections.

🚀 New

Multi-display mouse heat map support

Mouse clicks are now tracked per screen, so you can view heat maps across all your monitors or zoom in on a specific one. Heat map rendering also got a visual refresh.

Application Activity chart scrolling

You can now scroll beyond the default 24-hour view in the application activity chart, making it easier to look back in time.

Dark theme update

The dark mode has been refreshed to match the new WhatPulse website design—cleaner, sharper, and easier on the eyes.

🔧 Improvements

Separate internet traffic counting

WhatPulse now distinguishes internet traffic from local traffic. The UI update to show this is coming later, but exports already include it.

Full PCAP restored for network stats

Network tracking is now more accurate after dropping unreliable OS counters and returning to full packet capture. We also increased the packet buffer to 256MB, enabled immediate mode, and improved NIC buffering across platforms. This allows tracking up to 8 to 10Gbit/s of traffic.

Database loading and reliability

The app loads faster and handles large data better thanks to a new database engine, smarter integrity checks, and a larger cache. It now checks for database structure issues weekly and can auto-recover from corruption.

More

• Game controllers: Controllers from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, 8BitDo, and others now map correctly. Buttons no longer show up swapped or missing—WhatPulse detects the controller and applies the right layout automatically.
• Keyboard heat map: Apps are now grouped more logically (preventing duplicates), and tooltips show the full app paths.
• More readiness checks and state tracking were added to avoid duplicate events and rare startup crashes after waking from sleep.
• Network requests now have timeouts and the app resets its busy state if a request hangs.
• WhatPulse now runs on Qt 6.8.3 on Windows and macOS for improved stability and access to new platform features.
• Linux: Improved theme detection, fixed dragging on GNOME, corrected toolbar button placement, and added display detection for mouse tracking.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Windows: Fixed an issue where some installations triggered a UAC prompt during update checks.
• Fixed an issue where deleting a local profile added its stats to the global total (duplicating the stats).
• Fixed a visual issue where the update didn’t appear to complete if there was also an update to the MaintenanceTool (the updater). A manual restart was required to see the new version.
• Mouse details page: fixed lingering mouse button data when switching time ranges, even if the new range had no data.
• Clicks on the coordinates 0,0 have been exiled for good. No more mouse heat map only in the top left corner.
• Uptime chart no longer stretches the Y-axis when there's no data for a day.
• Fixed a styling issue where startup error messages were unreadable if the app failed badly.
• Fixed network time series on systems with multiple adapters—data is now grouped by hour/day correctly (feature not yet used in the app).
• Fixed the Swagger interface so the HTML renders properly instead of returning only JSON headers.

🚀 New

• Dark mode refresh: The dark theme now matches the new WhatPulse website style—sleek, sharp, and a bit easier on the eyes.

🔧 Improvements

• Keyboard heat map: Applications are now grouped properly by name (instead of showing the same app multiple times), and you'll see tooltips showing full app paths.
• The mouse heat map now refreshes instantly when your monitor setup changes—no restart needed.
• Better handling of extremely slow network requests: HTTP requests now have a timeout to avoid issues if something hangs, and we reset the app's busy state if it stalls.
• Database file size: We now explicitly checkpoint the database on startup and exit to keep the WAL file in check. A full integrity check is always performed after a database restore.

🐛 Bug fixes

• If something goes very wrong when WhatPulse starts, the popup message used to be styled wrong, and you couldn't read it. Now, you can.
• Fix for network time series on systems with multiple network adapters: it now groups by hour and day correctly, so you get accurate data. Note: the network time series isn't used in the app yet, but it's a step towards future features.

✨ New

• Add internet network traffic numbers to the exported csv via the Export Wizard, to compare total and internet traffic.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Windows: Fix a few scenarios where the mouse heat map was too big, when the display is scaled.
• Fix the Swagger UI and index on the Client API web server; it was returning the JSON header on all requests, making the HTML not render.
• Numerous updates to improve data loading speeds for larger datasets.

🚀 New

Game controller support with vendor-specific mappings

We've added smarter support for gamepads from different manufacturers. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and 8BitDo controllers (and others) now have proper button layouts, fixing swapped buttons and inconsistent mappings. The system identifies each controller and applies the right configuration automagically.

🔧 Improvements

Faster interface & database loading

Database performance has been significantly improved with a new engine, smarter integrity checks, and a larger cache. App launches are faster, and you'll notice fewer (to none at all) interface slowdowns when opening the window.

Database reliability improvements

When the WhatPulse app has a lot of local data, it's possible that an incident with your computer could bork WhatPulses' database. We've introduced structural issue detections, and integrity checks now run once every 7 days, and problematic database issues are now automagically recovered.

Mouse heatmap rendering and export improvements

The mouse heatmap now supports scaled displays on Windows, recalculates more efficiently & quickly with a lot of data, zooms more smoothly, and has a some tiny visual improvements. We've also limited heat map exports to a more usable size (800px).

🐛 Bug Fixes

• The computer uptime chart no longer stretches the Y-axis to 24 hours when there's no data for a given day.
• Windows: Certain installations got a UAC prompt when WhatPulse wanted to check for updates. Not anymore.
• Fixed duplicating local stats when deleting profiles. The stats of the to-be-deleted profile were added on top of the global stats.
• Fixed an issue where it looked like it wasn't updating WhatPulse when there was also an update to the MaintenanceTool (the updater). The process would bring the old version of WhatPulse up when it was still updating it, and only a manual restart would show you the new version.

This release focuses on making WhatPulse more stable, faster, and accurate—especially for users with larger databases or custom hardware setups. Let us know how it's working for you!