Show HN: LookAway, a Mac break reminder that knows when not to interrupt
9 hours ago (lookaway.com)
Hello, I'm Kushagra and I am the indie developer behind LookAway (I've posted about it earlier but it has received quite a lot of updates since the last time so I am posting it again).
LookAway is a native break reminder for macOS that doesn't interrupt. I built it because I work from home and I spend a lot of time in front of my screens. It's very easy for me to get lost in the flow and I can end up sitting for hours. Due to this, I started facing issues like eye strain and back pain by the end of the day.
The solution to this was simply taking enough breaks throughout the day. But remembering to take breaks was difficult, especially when I was in the flow. I tried some reminder apps but the problem with those was that they always interrupted me at the worst moments. So I ended up not using them.
LookAway is designed not to interrupt. It gives enough heads up before a break so that you're not caught off-guard. It's also context-aware and it automatically pauses when you go into a meeting, start watching a video, record screen, and much more. It even waits for you to finish typing or dictating when a break is due.
One thing worth mentioning is the free iOS counterpart LookAway Mirror. When your Mac goes on a break, your iOS devices can also mirror the same break so you don't end up scrolling your phone screen during the Mac break.
I've spent a lot of time in making LookAway the least annoying break reminder app and I would love to know your thoughts. It's a native Swift app so it doesn't take much resources (150MB RAM and <1% CPU when idle).
It's available to download from the website (lookaway.com), Setapp, and the App Store. Thank you!
I've been using it as part of my Setapp subscription, and it's a love-hate relationship. On the one side I appreciate the posture hint and the app nudging me to take a break. But ever so often I am in deep focus and get really annoyed when the "long break starting in 1 minute" notification pops up. Most of the time I am in the middle of writing when the break starts, and I click it away fast to not loose my thoughts. A feature recognizing active writing to push the break a minute would be helpful I guess.
Two things regarding the website:
- scrolling is so extremely laggy that the website is almost unusable on Firefox on macOS on an idle MacBook Pro (even if it seems smooth at first, scrolling up and down a few times slows it down significantly)
- I assume the code editor screenshot should actually be some sort of animation, it doesn't seem to work (although right clicking shows options like Pause, Loop...).
Looks really clean!
Distilled, this would be a nice macOS or Raycast feature, but I don't see myself giving up either $29 or 150MB RAM.
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This app was good but I ended up disabling it and they forgot to turn it back on.
How much trouble do you have with piracy? I notice there's a DMCA on Macked.app forcing one to sign in to download it. Do you contact sites manually or pay someone?
Do you think that people that pirate would pay if it wasn't cracked? Perhaps adding a crypto payment integration would allow more people to buy it.
For me, I will very rarely pay for software unless it accepts crypto, for privacy and convenience reasons.