the project

Horizon

Eye breaks that know when you are actually at the computer.

A macOS and Windows desktop app for 20-20-20 eye breaks. What makes it different is that it models presence, tracking idle time, lock state, sleep and wake, and fullscreen suppression, so it does not nag you about a break you were not there to miss.

the facts

Role: Solo
Year: 2026
Status: In progress
Category: Desktop

Built with

Electron
TypeScript
React
electron-vite
Vitest
Native bridges

Where to find it

Source

overview

What it is, and why it exists.

We blink around 60% less at a screen, and the fix is well known and never remembered: every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. The hard part of building the reminder is not the timer.

Horizon is the second attempt at this. The first, LookAway, established the shape: tray-resident, local-only, settings in a JSON file, no accounts and no backend. Horizon rebuilt it around an explicit domain model of a break loop, presence, suppression, an overlay and stats, because the first version's bugs were all really modelling problems wearing timer costumes.

problems

Challenges

A timer does not know if you are there

the problem

A plain interval timer fires while you are in a meeting, after you locked the screen, and the moment the laptop wakes with four missed breaks queued up. Each of those makes the app feel broken.

what I did

Presence is a first-class concept rather than a check bolted onto the timer: idle, locked, asleep and awake are normalised into one view of whether the user is actually at the computer, and the break loop consumes that instead of raw elapsed time.

Interrupting a presentation is unforgivable

the problem

A full-screen break overlay that appears while the user is presenting to a room, or mid-way through a film, is the one failure that guarantees uninstallation.

what I did

Suppression is its own policy, driven by fullscreen and presentation-like states, and it is allowed to override a due break entirely rather than merely delay the overlay.

Electron does not expose what is needed

the problem

Lock state, idle detection and fullscreen awareness differ per OS and are not fully available through Electron's cross-platform APIs.

what I did

Minimal per-platform native bridges, used only where Electron genuinely falls short, with everything else staying in shared TypeScript. The bridge is deliberately the smallest bridge that works rather than a full abstraction layer.

after

Results

One codebase for macOS and Windows, with native bridges only where required.
Breaks that respect idle, lock, sleep and fullscreen states.
Local-only: no account, no backend, settings in a JSON file on disk.

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