Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Firefox Extension: Take A Break version 1.1


Click here for the online help of the old version 1.0.x.

Addicted to the Web? Don't compromise your health! Continuously staring at the computer can cause headaches, blurred vision, neck pain, fatigue, dry eyes. Take A Break extension tries to help you avoid or reduce these problems. It reminds you when to take a break while you are surfing the Web.

Features
- A little icon on the status bar will be flashing every 15 minutes to remind you a short break. You should sit back and close your eyes, or look outside the window for a while. The extension can also keep beeping while the icon is flashing if you enable the sound option.

- A pop-up dialog will remind you a big break every hour. You should stand up, get a cup of coffee, do some stretching, or go freshen up.

- You can adjust the timers according to your own needs.

Installation
Download and install it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45343

You will need to restart the Firefox browser after the installation.

After the Firefox browser restarts, you will see an icon of a green clock on your status bar. If your status bar is hidden, you could show it by selecting menu View->Status Bar.




How does it work
- The clock icon on the status bar will be flashing in red and yellow every 15 minutes to remind you a short break.
-- Take A Break extension is on.
-- Icon is flashing and reminding you to take a short break.

- A pop-up dialog will remind you a big break every hour. The pop-up window will be automatically closed after 5 minutes. You can click on the text to close it, too. Clicking on the URL will bring you to more Firefox extensions I made.


- A click on the clock icon will switch off and on its function. If the function is turned off, the icon is in gray.
-- Take A Break extension is off.

- Right-click the icon and you can select to open the Options dialog. Here you can adjust the timers to meet your own needs. See the next section for the meanings of the options.

- Move the mouse over the icon and you can see when the next break will come.

- Of course, you can also open the Options dialog through the menu: Tools->Add-ons->Extensions, and click on the Options button of this extension.


Options setting
Click here to see how to open the "Options" dialog.




- Enable Flashing: enable/disable the feature of icon flashing. If it is not checked, the following two timers of Flashing Interval and Flashing Duration are ignored.

- Flashing Interval: the time between two flashing. You can set a value between 1 to 999 minutes.

- Flashing Duration: the duration of the flashing. You can set a value between 1 to 999 seconds.

- Enable Pop-up Reminder: enable/disable the feature of pop-up reminding. If it is not checked, the following two timers of Rest Interval and Rest Duration are ignored.

- Rest Interval: the time between two pop-up reminding. You can set a value between 1 to 999 minutes.

- Rest Duration: after this long, the pop-up window will be closed automatically. You can set a value between 1 to 999 minutes.

- No reminding if idle for XXX min: if checked, you can inform the extension that XXX minutes of no mouse movement means you are not browsing. So that the extension would temporary stop when you had left your desk.

- Enable Sound: You can enable sound for the short break. When it is enabled, the extension will keep beeping while the icon is flashing, and stop beeping when the short break ends. So you can know when to open your eyes if you close your eyes during the short break. It is also useful for those users who focus too much on the content to notice the changing of the icon on the status bar, or those who does not show the browser's status bar at all. The Sound Option is off by default -- some people may find it annoying.

- Use My Text in Reminder: A more fancy reminder window pops up to remind you a rest. It gives some suggestions -- with graphics -- of what you could do during the long break. If you like a simple and clean dialog instead, you can use this option to show only the text you choose.

You can click on the Restore defaults button to restore all the timers to their default values.

6 comments:

Raquel said...

Can you make it so you can customize the sound, please? Or can I do that somehow myself?

Thanks.

Unknown said...

Can you make it so you can customize the sound? Or is that already possible?

Thanks.

Zen said...

No, the sound cannot be customized. How do you want it?

wonza said...

Is it possible to add a reset button? Sometimes I have to take a break early, or late, it'd be nice to have an option to reset the timer. thanks :)

Unknown said...

I'm seeing this extension impact my framerate way out of proportion to its functionality. about:performance says:
Take A Break has slown down Firefox frequently. When this happens, the slowdown is generally important.
Full name: takeabreak@ttt-jl.blogspot.com.
Impact on framerate: 3725 high-impacts, 12 medium-impact (138 alerts).
CPU usage: 1% (total 204856760ms).
System usage: 1% (total 5748842ms).
Blocking process calls: 0% (total 0ms).
Measure start: 30892 seconds ago.
Processes: 9927 (parent)

I'm using Take A Break Version 1.3.1-signed.1-signed on Firefox 50.1.0 on Arch Linux.

Unknown said...

I like your add-on/extension, but I'm going to have to un-install it since it does not support multiprocessor Firefox e10s.
Thank you for all your time and work.

 
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