Solo · 2026
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 — idle time, lock state, sleep and wake, fullscreen suppression — so it does not nag you about a break you were not there to miss.
We blink around 60% less at a screen, and the fix — every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds — is well known and never remembered. 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 — a break loop, presence, suppression, an overlay, stats — because the first version's bugs were all really modelling problems wearing timer costumes.
Problems worth solving
A timer does not know if you are there
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.
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
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.
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
Lock state, idle detection and fullscreen awareness differ per OS and are not fully available through Electron's cross-platform APIs.
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 surface that works rather than a full abstraction layer.
What came of it
- 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.