While unfortunately much maligned, misunderstood, and under-appreciated, MDM for OSX is part of a growing trend within the greater community of Macintosh developers towards enhanced cybermetric observation of personal computing platforms.

Other initiatives include system add-ons and stand-alone applications that seamlessly track such data as number of times computers are started-up and shut-down, frequency of laptop lid closures, keys typed per minute, per hour, per day, week, month, year, mouse movement patterns (i.e. constant, smooth, steady, active, dynamic, jumpy, erratic, wild, etc), voice recognition statistics (i.e. voice volume averages, frequency of detected speech, basic analysis of audible emotional cues and other speech patterns over time), sound volume and screen brightness adjustments, application meta histories, and many other observed patterns, including, of course mouse distance travelled.

Among developers participating in this trend there is much excitement and enthusiasm, and a hope that increased cybermetric data collection and SETI@home-like sharing of the task of analysis, will result in further empowerment of endusers to better manage and control their experience, while assisting developers moving forward towards the creation of applications that better understand, address and automatically self-adapt to the ever-changing personal computing environment, and the evolving needs and habits of the individual humans who operate these machines.