Time Out is a must-have tool for people who often forget to take breaks from their work. The program lets you know when it's time to move away from your monitor and relax your eyes or stretch. Not many people are aware of the risks they face when working too long in front of a screen.
Before using the program on your Mac, you first need to go to System Preferences and grant it permission to detect keyboard activity. By default, Time Out can detect mouse or trackpad usage, but not keyboard activity. So, make sure you complete this step before working with Time Out on your computer. The instructions are given by the Welcome assistant of the tool.
You have access to 2 reminder profiles which can be altered to meet your needs. One of the profiles is created for small breaks while the other one is for longer breaks. You can change the amount of time per break, alter the notification options according to your needs, and schedule the alarms however you like.
Another great thing about this tool is that it provides you with an option to skip breaks if a certain program is opened or frontmost.
The only aspect that bothers me is that you need to pay if you want to manage more than 2 break profiles.
Hence, it's worth downloading and installing this program on your Mac if the aforementioned flaw means nothing to you. Overall, Time Out provides you with many useful advantages, is simple to handle, and works 100%.
v2.2 [Mar 14, 2017]
- Added an "Activity" item in the sidebar, that optionally shows a chart of activity, including breaks you've taken, apps you've used, and time away from the Mac.
- Activity tracking is off by default, for privacy reasons. You can enable it via a button at the top of the Activity page, which displays a menu with options to Track Breaks, Track Apps, and clear the recorded activity.
- On the right-hand side of the Activity page is a slider to zoom the scale; you can also pinch to zoom on a trackpad. The scale goes from 1 day to 1 minute, or even to individual activity items.
- Each line of the activity chart shows the activity grouped together for the scale time period, arranged with breaks before apps, and the longest first. For example, if at a 15 minute scale, it might show 5 minutes of a break, 5 minutes of Safari usage, 3 minutes of Mail, 2 minutes of natural breaks (idle).
- Hover over an activity in the chart to see a tooltip with the break or app name, how many times it occurred in this time period, and how long for.
- Recorded activity lives on your Mac, and isn't shared with anyone else.
- This feature is available as a reward for current supporters. If you were a supporter in the past, but it has expired, you can extend your supporter status to use this feature.
- Added a "Muscles" theme, contributed by "saltymouse", to show a random exercise (from a customizable list) with reps to do during breaks.
- Added a "GiphyStretch" theme, contributed by Sean Carey of Giphy, to show a series of stretching GIFs.
- Added a "GiphyPuppies" theme, also contributed by Sean Carey, to show a series of puppy GIFs.
- Extended the break theme JavaScript to support a window.webkit.messageHandlers.getTimeOutConfig.postMessage('') message to get a JSON of the break configuration. It will call back to a timeOutConfig(json) function, passing the JSON. Properties include format (the JSON format, initially 1), identifier (the break's unique identifier), name (the break's name), durationSeconds (the break duration expressed in seconds), durationString (e.g. "10 minutes"), frequencySeconds (the frequency in seconds), frequencyString (e.g. "1 hour"), beginningSeconds (the fade-in time), endingSeconds (the fade-out time).
- Also extended the JavaScript to support a window.webkit.messageHandlers.getTimeOutState.postMessage('') message, to get a JSON of the break state information. It will call back to a timeOutState(json) function, passing the JSON. Properties include format (e.g. 1), nextDue (e.g. an ISO date like "2016-09-29T23:27:51Z"), lastStarted, lastDone, lastDeferred (also dates), lastPhase (e.g. done, skipped, or postponed), and currentPhase (e.g. pending, starting, started, or finishing).
- Fixed an issue where choosing None for the break theme would revert back to the default Icon theme, even for supporters (this is expected for non-supporters).
- On the Actions page, renamed After Finish to After Done, to be consistent with other uses ("finish" is when the break is expected to end, "done" is after it has actually successfully completed, as opposed to other ends of the break like "skip" or "postpone").
- Added a View menu to the menu bar, to enable easier navigation of the preference pages (the keyboard shortcuts can still be used when the menu bar is hidden).
- Added an alert when turning on the option to automatically start Time Out, if the app isn't in the Applications folder.
- When using a MacBook Pro with integrated and discrete GPUs, now attempts to remain using the integrated GPU, to save battery.
- Now remembers the visibility state of the Preferences window. If you close it, it will remain closed when you next start the app, or if you leave it open, it will re-open. The window will always display when later switching to the app, when the Dock icon is shown.
- Improved the scheduler's idle handling to cope with macOS calling the timer less frequently than requested (as a power-saving measure).
- Added a separate Exclusions preference to skip breaks when the Mac display is asleep (in addition to the preference to skip during the screensaver).
- Moved the Learn More button on the Support Time Out page, to make it more discoverable.
