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%.
v2.4 [Mar 19, 2018]
- Added page buttons to the Activity page of the preferences, with Activity and Statistics pages.
- The Activity page is the same as before.
- The new Statistics page includes a summary of breaks, pop-up menus to choose the kind of counter and break(s) to display, and a line chart of count values.
- The count options include the number of times a break was postponed, skipped, or done in a day, or the total duration of that break.
- The menus also enable displaying those counts for all breaks, or just a specific one.
- When showing All Breaks, the values for each break are stacked.
- The chart will not be shown initially; come back after a couple of days to see it, once some history has been gathered.
- Also includes a Share button to the right of the page buttons, to make it easy to tweet etc the stats.
- Added an option to the Break Appearance page to disable the Postpone and Skip buttons for a few seconds.
- The number of seconds can be changed; it includes the fade-in time.
- This feature helps break a habitual clicking of the buttons; to encourage you to consider if you really need to skip a break.
- This 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, or try for an hour at a time.
- The break frequency now can't be less than the duration; it doesn't make sense to work for negative time.
- The break should no longer be due further away than the frequency, unless you manually skip it multiple times.
- If a break would be due in the past after rescheduling it, it is now reset. This should fix the issue where a break could sometimes start soon after waking from sleep.
- Fixed an issue where manually starting a break soon after another one could leave the actions in an unexpected state.
- When a postpone/skip limit is set and has been reached, postponing or skipping via the File menu, action menu, or global keyboard shortcut is now disabled, so the limit can't be bypassed.
- Fixed the postpone/skip left display when a limit is turned on when already postponed/skipped more than that today.
- The Time Out item is now always in the Window menu, to make it easier to re-display the preferences window if closed.
- When the Dock icon is hidden, and the status item is shown, the status popover will now appear on clicking the mouse, instead of releasing it; a subtle improvement.
- Can now use the up and down arrow keys and type selection to navigate in the sidebar, e.g. show the preferences window or status popover and press "G" to go to the General options.
- Updated the Start Screensaver and Stop Screensaver script actions, to work more reliably on recent macOS versions. Thanks to Johan Kaving.
- Removed the help book, since it didn't work properly in recent OS versions. The help is still available on the web, and has been updated for version 2.4.
- Some tweaks to the supporter stuff, to fix an issue with previous supporter features incorrectly showing as unavailable.
- Fixed typos in some Break Appearance tooltips.
