Keystroke recording

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Hugh Paterson III

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Mar 18, 2014, 1:44:14 AM3/18/14
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I am looking to test the efficiency of several keyboard layouts for minority languages with diacritics and tone marks in their orthographies. I am looking to do this though recording the keystrokes made by users. Does anyone know of any software which does this. 

I am aware of KeyCapture by William Soukoreff and Scott MacKenzie, but this is windows only. I am also aware of http://www.whatpulse.org/ But I don't really want to expose users to a web service (privacy issues and all that).


- Hugh  

Sorin Paliga

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Mar 18, 2014, 3:40:38 AM3/18/14
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Hello

I would also be interested in such an application, as I have also created quite a few keylayouts. As far as I know, there is no such app, but perhaps Keyboard Viewer would be sufficient, if combined with a screen capture movie. Or am I wrong?

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sil.linguist

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Mar 18, 2014, 10:02:58 PM3/18/14
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A screen video would not be enough. The application KeyCapture [http://soukoreff.com/academic/textinput/keycapture/] and its associated paper Soukoreff, R. W., & MacKenzie, I. S. (2003). Metrics for text entry research: An evaluation of MSD and KSPC, and a new unified error metricProceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI 2003, pp. 113-120. New York: ACM. [http://www.yorku.ca/mack/chi03.pdf] provide a lot of detail like time of key down and time of key up, etc. The log looks a bit like this:

395 KeyPress    20030609-120943-774 "SHIFT" Status=(down) Key(16) Extra(0x2a)
396 KeyPress    20030609-120943-963 "T" Status=(down) Key(84) Extra(0x14)
397 KeyPress    20030609-120944-025 "T" Status=(up) Key(84) Extra(0xc014)
398 KeyPress    20030609-120944-051 "SHIFT" Status=(up) Key(16) Extra(0xc02a)
399 KeyPress    20030609-120944-210 "H" Status=(down) Key(72) Extra(0x23)
400 KeyPress    20030609-120944-294 "H" Status=(up) Key(72) Extra(0xc023)

So even keys which don't produce output get recorded. - which of course is logical because the user is pressing the key, so it should count as "keystroke effort"....

- hugh

Geke

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Mar 19, 2014, 1:37:27 AM3/19/14
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Sorin Paliga

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Mar 19, 2014, 1:43:28 AM3/19/14
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For OS X, this one:
may be also what he is looking for. I will have a look at it later today.

Andrew Cunningham

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Mar 19, 2014, 2:16:09 AM3/19/14
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these sound more like user installable spyware rather than than tools to analyse keystroke frequency re usability, hci and ergonomics
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Sorin Paliga

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Mar 19, 2014, 2:22:50 AM3/19/14
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May be… I have never used it. Nevertheless, it has got 5 * on the reference site macupdate.com, if this may be relevant. 

Geke

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Mar 19, 2014, 5:47:50 AM3/19/14
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That’s because they are mainly spyware!... but does it matter, if they do what you need?
Anyway, somehow I found one that looks better, but I must say Andrew, I feel a bit funny doing web searches you could have done yourself...
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/16155/logkext

Sorin Paliga

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Mar 19, 2014, 5:52:31 AM3/19/14
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Obviously, if an app ‘steals’ data from other apps and displays it later, it definitely is spyware. The problem is, whether it offers legitimitate or ilegitimate data to other people, it seems it does not, but who knows? (:
It seems OS X does not seem to have a dedicated app capable of offering details regarding a succession of key strokes, and thus allowing additional data for certain purposes. 

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