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%.
v2.3 [Oct 2, 2017]
- Added an option to the Break Appearance preferences page to enable displaying the number of times a break has been postponed, skipped, and/or done each day, so you know how "good" you're being today.
- Also added options to enable limiting the number of times it can be postponed and/or skipped each day. Useful if you find those buttons too hard to resist, but still want them there sometimes.
- These features are available as rewards for current supporters. If you were a supporter in the past, but it has expired, you can extend your supporter status to use these features, or try for an hour at a time.
- If both Postpone buttons and the Skip button are hidden, the control panel is now smaller.
- Added an option to the Break Name preferences page to show the break label as a miniature pie chart of today's postponed/skipped/done counts.
- The pie has an outline of the label color, with the postpones wedge as a lighter label color, skips as gray, and the wedge for done is shown as the label color.
- Added a tooltip on the label icon that displays the same text as above.
- This feature is also available as a reward for current supporters.
- Added a new Tropical Rain break theme, kindly contributed by Nick Kaijaks.
- Added a Cosmic Symbolism theme, as a bookmark to the Cosmic Symbolism website, similar to the other zooming ones. Kindly contributed by Justin Hall.
- Added an Away From Desk theme, that simply displays a message about being away from the desk for a RSI break. Kindly contributed by John Braine.
- Updated the Muscles theme.
- Removed the Emoji Zone theme, as the website that hosted it is no longer available.
- Improved the accessibility prompt when starting the app for the first time, to not show the permissions alert until after the Setup Assistant has been closed, and only if the the suggestion of authorizing it wasn't done.
- Removed the Post Tweet break action, as High Sierra unfortunately no longer includes built-in support for posting to Twitter.
- Fixed the View menu items becoming disabled when the sidebar isn't active.
- If a laptop lid is closed during a break, then re-opened before the break would have been finished, the break will now continue.
- Restoring a purchase now re-displays the message of thanks in the sidebar; you can dismiss it via the (X) button next to the message if desired.
- Fixed an issue with High Sierra, where the label and theme background colors could be unexpectedly changed to white. If affected, the colors will be reverted back to the defaults.
- Fixed some display issues with the the Break Actions page on High Sierra.
