For years, I’ve seen references to “indie” (independent) software developers, but never considered myself one. I’ve never had to rely on sales of my own software as I’ve been an independent contractor without my own products (that brought in any significant amount of income) for almost five years. However, this past year, ReceiptWallet has started to change that; I’m not about to give up my day job, but in an exchange with another developer today, he referred to both of us as “indie” developers. I guess I am an independent developer.

After fighting with trying to get the amount of time since a user has done something with the system, I’ve determined that CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType is broken. The documentation indicates that calling it like:

CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGAnyInputEventType)

will tell me how many seconds since the user last moved the mouse, touched the keyboard, etc. The docs say:

The various system and app defined events do not contribute to this event type’s time.

Unfortunately this just isn’t true. In one app I’m working on, I have a timer that fires every 5 seconds and prints the idle time. It starts going up, but then a notification comes in and it resets back to zero without me touching the keyboard. So, this call is almost useless as I need to know when things are idle in order to perform some tasks. While some of you are saying that I can use a Carbon Event Idle Timer, it turns out that they don’t work in background only apps. My only solution is to make the above call using something like:

+ (double) idleTimeInSeconds
{
	double idleTime = 0;
	double tempIdleTime = 0;
	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventLeftMouseDown);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventLeftMouseUp);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventRightMouseDown);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventRightMouseUp);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventMouseMoved);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventLeftMouseDragged);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventRightMouseDragged);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventKeyDown);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventKeyUp);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventFlagsChanged);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventScrollWheel);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventTabletPointer);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventTabletProximity);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventOtherMouseDown);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventOtherMouseUp);
	if (idleTime == 0 || tempIdleTime < idleTime)
	{
		idleTime = tempIdleTime;
	}

	tempIdleTime = CGEventSourceSecondsSinceLastEventType(kCGEventSourceStateCombinedSessionState, kCGEventOtherMouseDragged);

	return idleTime;
}

Wow, that is freaking ugly, but at least I know exactly when a user event occurred. Feel free to use my code in any way you see fit. I've searched the web and found answers to a lot of my problems, so here's a small contribution back to the community.