Intermission for Mac

Avoid eye pain and fatigue by limiting your screentime

7 followers

Avoid eye pain and fatigue by limiting your screentime

7 followers

Intermission is a simple app that helps you look away from your screen periodically. It's based on the 20-20-20 rule (every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds) but can be adjusted to your liking with multiple customizations.

Free Options

Launch tags:

Mac•Health & Fitness•Productivity

Launch Team

Alex Greene

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Maker

Hi Product Hunt! In January, I acquired Breaks For Eyes from Gikken. They were planning on shutting it down and I saw the potential to keep it running and make it better. It might seem trivial to some, but this app has really improved my life. As my mom is an optician, I've known about the 20-20-20 rule for a long time, but have never been able to hold myself accountable and keep up the habit. I've renamed it Intermission, with many improvements, and a new look. All the changes I've made have been based on an incredible amount of customer feedback, as well as my own experience using the app, and I hope you enjoy. Would love to know what alternatives you're using, if any, and what you think of Intermission!

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4yr ago

Eugene Hauptmann

LLC Toolkit

@alexg473 Nice, it would be great to add integration with Apple Watch and other iOS devices. Specifically proximity sensors (BLE) and others. Alex, have you tested this with multiple screens? An integration with a calendar would be nice to have too.

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4yr ago

Alex Greene

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Maker

@eugenehp Thanks Eugene! There is an iOS app in the works, although it probably will not sync. I’m curious, how would you expect them to interact?

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4yr ago

Eugene Hauptmann

LLC Toolkit

@alexg473 Idea would be to limit the screen time across the devices. Not just switch from one device to another, right?

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4yr ago

Mohen Li

I've been using this for a while now and I was wondering if it was possible to somehow detect if a video was playing so that it would pause the video automatically when the intermission starts? I often miss/ignore the heads up notification when watching videos. It's a very minor issue and I don't know if it's at all feasible but just a thought!

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4yr ago

Mohen Li

Another thought: add an option on the intermission screen to pause the video before taking the intermission?

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4yr ago

Alex Greene

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Maker

@mohen_li Hi Mohen, thanks for using Intermission! It's funny, because with the latest update I spent a lot of time trying to do exactly what you describe. If you're interested in the technical details, keep reading... There's no easy way to detect if a video is playing on your computer, though it might be possible with a custom browser extension. But that would ignore any videos played outside of the browser, and would probably require some pretty invasive permissions, not to mention a lot of work to build extensions for multiple browsers. What I did attempt is to use audio as a proxy for this, and came very close to a solution. As a developer I can send a signal to play/pause your computer's audio, which of course could pause a song on Spotify/iTunes/etc, but it also works for any video/media which is the source of the audio-- so a YouTube video for example. While I was able to pause/play the audio, I was not able to figure out a way to detect if there was actually any audio playing to begin with. So if you weren't listening/watching anything and your Intermission began, Intermission would send the "signal", which would begin playing something-- the exact opposite of what I want to happen. I've asked a question on the Apple Developer Forums about this but have not heard anything yet: https://developer.apple.com/foru... I'd really like to add this and other "smart" things into Intermission in the future. Let me know if you ever have more great ideas! alex@tryintermission.com

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4yr ago

Alex Greene

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Maker

@mohen_li Could you clarify-- Do you mean having a pause audio/media button on the heads-up notification?

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4yr ago

Mohen Li

@alexg473 Thats great! Your method does show some promise for sure. I was thinking maybe there could be a button on the Intermission break screen below the "skip" option such that when you click on it, it briefly takes you out of the break screen (for maybe 5-10 sec, have an optional small floating timer that shows you the time?) so you can pause/save whatever you were playing/watching/doing. The button could be label as "Let me pause/save" or something along those lines. After that, the Intermission screen would automatically kick in for the normal duration. This might be a temporary solution until you can find a way to automate the video pausing. As a bonus benefit, this "let me pause/save" button on the break screen would be a great way to remind people to save their work.

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4yr ago