Keystroke recording

[Hugh Paterson III]

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]

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?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ukelele Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ukelele-user...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ukelel...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ukelele-users.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[sil.linguist]

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 metric. Proceedings 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]

I did a search and found a few commercial ones for 30$-40$:
http://www.anykeylogger.com/keystroke-logger-for-mac.html
http://www.winsite.com/Utilities/Miscellaneous/Hidetools-Spy-Monitor-Full-Version/
http://mackeylogger.co/index.html
http://www.macmonitoring.net/macmonitoring/mac-monitoring-software.html

This one could be old and costs more, but it’s shareware:
http://www.winsite.com/Utilities/Security/Mac-Log-Manager/
http://www.best-spy-soft.com/rem-key/mac-keylogger.html

The market is rather lively, see this really expensive one:
http://www.amackeylogger.com/mac-keylogger-features.html

[Sorin Paliga]

For OS X, this one:

http://www.keylogger-mac.com/aobo-free-keylogger-for-mac-os-x

may be also what he is looking for. I will have a look at it later today.

[Andrew Cunningham]

these sound more like user installable spyware rather than than tools to analyse keystroke frequency re usability, hci and ergonomics

--

Andrew Cunningham
Project Manager, Research and Development
(Social and Digital Inclusion)
Public Libraries and Community Engagement
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia

Ph: +61-3-8664-7430
Mobile: 0459 806 589
Email: acunn...@slv.vic.gov.au
          lang.s...@gmail.com

http://www.openroad.net.au/
http://www.mylanguage.gov.au/
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/

[Sorin Paliga]

May be… I have never used it. Nevertheless, it has got 5 * on the reference site macupdate.com, if this may be relevant. 

[Geke]

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]

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.