BlinkBrew reminds you to look away from the screen, and then makes it easy to actually do it.
Every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. That is the whole rule eye doctors give out, and the reason almost nobody follows it is that nobody remembers. BlinkBrew remembers: it counts down quietly in the corner of your screen, and when the time is up it dims the screen and shows a ring that empties over twenty seconds. When the ring runs out, you carry on.
Highlights
- Always in the corner - the icon sits by your clock, counting down to your next break. Or turn the count off and keep just the icon.
- Every screen, not just one - all your screens dim together, and it works over apps running fullscreen, which is where people most need reminding. Plug a screen in halfway through a break and it gets covered too.
- It never eats what you were typing - the break does not steal focus. The screen darkens; your keystrokes still land where you aimed them.
- Skip it, or push it out - one button ends this break, another moves it a few minutes later. Either way you get a whole fresh interval, not another break thirty seconds on.
- Strict mode - for the days you skip every single one. No Skip button, and the icon in the corner will not let you out either. There is still one way through, and you will know what it is.
- It knows when you were away - shut the lid for an hour and it picks up at the start of a fresh interval instead of firing a pile of missed breaks at you.
- Set to suit you - fifteen minutes to an hour between breaks, twenty seconds to two minutes each, and four dim strengths from a light haze to almost black.
- Out of the way - it lives in the corner of your screen, opens at login if you want, and has no window you need to keep around.
- Nothing leaves your computer - no account for the timer, no history collected, no server in the middle.
How it works
Open BlinkBrew and it starts counting. There is nothing to set up and no permission to grant - it does not read your screen, your files or what you are working on. It only knows what time it is.
When a break arrives the screen dims and a ring counts twenty seconds down. Look out a window, at a wall across the room, at anything that is not thirty centimetres from your face. The dim lifts on its own.
If a break lands at the worst possible moment, skip it. If you find yourself skipping every one, turn on strict mode and let the ring finish.
Perfect for
- Long days at a screen - the eye strain that shows up at five o'clock starts building at ten.
- Anyone told to take breaks and forgetting to - the advice is easy, remembering is the hard part.
- Deep work - a hard stop you did not have to decide on, so you can drop back in without having watched a clock.
