What is this?
RestYourEyes RestYourEyes is a lightweight (2Mb!) macOS menu bar application designed to help you reduce eye strain by reminding you to take regular breaks. It implements the popular 20-20-20 rule and other common timing patterns to keep your eyes healthy while working on your computer.
It has 3 presets for breaks intervals and pauses, and will show a full-screen overlay (across all monitors) that can be snoozed or skipped altogether.
Tech stack
I built this using Zig and Objective-C, although Cursor did some heavy lifting for the latter. I wished to get better at Zig, and it was fun!
Objective-C handles all the UI, while Zig handles state, presets, timers, as well as telling the UI what to do (showing the timer).
Why build this?
Because I can.
However, it’s because a colleague was using Intermission (paid app), and I learned it was several HUNDRED MEGABYTES, and thought: wow, I could make a better system.
Here is the ChatGPT generated logo:
