Application Statistics
From Mugshot Developer Wiki
Depending on how you count it, the Fedora universe of packages (Core + Extras) has about 840 applications in it. That's how many things that would appear in your desktop menus if you installed everything. Other Linux distributions may have even more applications.
When you start getting that number of things to sort through, trying to find stuff in a menu or in a big list of applications gets pretty hard. So, we thought we'd do some experiments in using the Mugshot infrastructure to provide a better way of accessing the information. What are the most frequently used applications in each category? What applications do your friends use? and so forth.
See the recent application usage blog entry
Contents |
Statistics
What we have initially is pretty simple... just global statistics by category. You can find this at mugshot.org/applications What you can also do there (if you are a Mugshot user on Linux) is to enable sharing of your own application statistics. The information we track is pretty innocuous, it's completely opt-in; unless you enable the feature, we don't look at your application usage at all.
Rank
An applications Rank is the relative number assigned to it based on it's usage in comparison with the other applications that have been monitored.
Usage
The Usage number is the sum of everyone's use of an application per day (24 hours) over a 30 day period. This count determines and applications rank.
Applications
Name
The application name is extracted from it's desktop file and links to the applications individual page.
Category
The application category is also extracted from the desktop file and links to the category page where all applications of that category are listed in ranked order.
Icon
The icon for an application is extracted from it's package.
Category Graph
A Category Graph is provided on the applications page to indicate what application categories are more popular than others. The darker and larger bars indicate the more popular categories, while lighter and smaller bars indicate the less popular categories.
The categories listed should be consistent with the categories in the menus, however sometimes they are slightly different.
Your Application Usage
When you are sharing your application statistics, check your account to see if you are, you will see section under the category graph for your application usage. This listing doesn't provide rank or usage for your personal applications but gives an indication of what applications you use as the system sees.
Frequently Answered Questions
Is Mugshot watching the sites I go to?
No. We the mugshot developers do not want to know what kind of web sites you go to. The more anonymous the better here, honestly things like this are not valueable to us and frankly would scare us a lot. Keep your privacy! (we do take that seriously) Mugshot only looks for the type of application running, but does not look to what that application is viewing / editing / watching / whatever.
How are you getting the application names?
Every couple of seconds we’re asking X what is the active wm-class name. Some of the poorly named wm-classes are falling through the cracks, but the overal we’re capturing most. WM-CLASS names usually resemble the binary file name and look like this:
Gnome-terminal Inkscape Kaddressbook Evolution-2.6
Why don't I see the application I use?
The application statistics site uses a cache system so you won't always see your application right away. However there are some applications that aren't currently recognized and therefore won't show up at all. We're working on making sure all applications can be recognized and their information displayed correctly. Feel free to contact us if you have this concern.
