Sunday, January 10, 2010

Google Chrome Extension: Take A Break


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 tool 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.

- 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 it here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kfcgkgmiedhpoalhpmalhjjcnhpkapgl

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

After the installation, you will see an icon of a green clock on your tool bar.




How does it work
- The clock icon on the tool 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 "Take A Break" text to close it, too. Clicking on the URL will bring you to more Chrome 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 Extensions page.

Options setting
- 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. The default value is 15 minutes.

- Flashing Duration: the duration of the flashing. The default value is 30 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. The default value is 60 minutes.

- Rest Duration: after this long, the pop-up window will be closed automatically. The default value is 5 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. The default value is 10 minutes.

Limitations
This extension uses content script to capture the movement of your mouse and key strokes. So it has the limitations due to the use of content scripts.

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If you think this extension is helpful, please share it with your friends.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You should check your code, becouse it's filling RAM too for a little tool like this

Anonymous said...

"Stare bugs"? Shouldn't it be stare AT bugs?

 
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