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Show HN: LookAway – My first native macOS app to combat digital eye strain (lookaway.app)

22 points by _kush ↗ HN
Hi HN! I'm Kushagra. I created LookAway after suffering from eye strain due to working for long hours staring at my screen.

The app nudges you to take regular breaks by blurring the screen to help reduce eye strain. It gives a heads-up before each break so you can wrap up tasks, and you can adjust the break intervals and durations to fit your routine.

LookAway is smart - it works when you work, pauses when you don't, and handles idle time intelligently. I’d love to hear your feedback to improve it. Check it out at https://lookaway.app. Thank you for your time!

14 comments

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treebeard5440
I like the idea of a screen blur. Is there a setting to detect if you’re on a zoom call (or webex, teams, etc) and disable the blur?
_kush
Not yet but it's planned as the immediate next feature (it's not trivial to detect meetings across different apps/browsers - i am still figuring it out). For now, there's a pause button in the menu bar app to manually disable it for some time.
tendencydriven
I'm not sure if this is possible at all, but perhaps detecting if the user's microphone or webcam is in use could be a good way of detecting meetings.
_kush
Interesting solution! I think it's possible - I'll try it out, thanks!
_kush
I've added this setting in the latest update. Thank you for the tip :)
Obscurity4340
Amazing idea, already do this naturally myself but nice to have a digital analogue to that experience!
anosidium
Nice app. Why is it not on the Mac App Store? How do you feel that Apple might make one for the Mac thus sherlocking your app? Apple did it with Night Shift.
tikkun
Looks great. I currently use "Time Out" for this and like it a lot. What're the main differences?
neontomo
I like the idea, and it's backed by science as far as I know. Looking into the distance for a while lets your eye muscles relax and reset from staring at something that is close to your eyes for an extended period.

Can you offer a free/cheaper version with less features? A short trial period does nothing to wet my appetite, it only makes me avoid the app so that I don't get addicted to it and end up spending money. Nothing against your product.

SebastianKra
I'm definitely in the market for this, as my current favourite App, Intermission, hasn't been updated in two years. I already prefer the wording and visual design of your App. I also prefer that pre-break reminders are visually distinct from notifications, as this made me eventually ignore regular notifications. The difficulty with these apps, is that you must interrupt the user in just the right way so that they don't get annoyed or ignore you after the 100th time.

However, there are two things that I'm missing from Intermission:

1. Show the remaining time directly in the menu bar.

2. Pause the app for a few hours or until the end of the day - this is useful for meetings. I usually forget to re-enable the timer afterwards.

I also liked how Intermission has all options in a single non-hierarchical menu. Again, the use case for this is when I realise that I forgot to turn it off during a meeting and quickly need to snooze it.

_kush
Thanks for replying! You're right - I had to experiment with the pre break reminder a lot before I found the right balance (both visuals and the timing). I've published an update which will allow you to see the time remaining in menu bar (can be enabled in settings), and LookAway will now auto pause when you're in a meeting or on a call. It'll also resume as soon as the call is ended.

Let me know if you have any other feedback! Happy to hear :)