It would be interesting to find out how users use Zutilo. One way to do this would be add to Zutilo a function that would send back some information about how Zutilo was configured. The way I think this would work is like this:
Collect:
all shortcuts that have a keyboard shortcut assigned to them
all menu item functions that are assigned to the Zotero or Zutilo menus
Present the two lists to the user and ask if it is okay to send this data to Zutilo
Set up a server that will receive just these lists as a web request (no other information except possibly a random ID). No identifying information like an IP address will be saved.
The server will keep the full set of data in a format for anyone to view
Zutilo will store a setting to know that it has already sent data or the user has opted not to send data and will not ask to send it again.
Zutilo will store locally the time at which it was installed and first present the option to send usage at some later time (1 month?) so that users have time to enable/disable the features they want.
Perhaps there could be a button to "resend usage data" that would send the data to the server again, though there would be no way to update a previous report unless a random ID was attached to the report.
I don't think there is a way to prevent someone skewing the results by generating a lot of fake results if they really wanted to.
I am not sure that I will have time to implement this. It would be nice to know though which features are heavily used vs. used by only a handful of people.
It would be interesting to find out how users use Zutilo. One way to do this would be add to Zutilo a function that would send back some information about how Zutilo was configured. The way I think this would work is like this:
I am not sure that I will have time to implement this. It would be nice to know though which features are heavily used vs. used by only a handful of people.