What’s new in BlinkBreaks

New

• A new main window that keeps Home, Rhythm, Smart Pause, Breaks, Behavior and About in one sidebar, instead of scattering them across a dashboard and a separate settings window.

• Blinky, the eye that watches your cursor from the Home screen and quietly tells you whether a session is running.

• A guided first run that sets your focus length and eye rest in a few steps, so the app is useful before you open a single setting.

• A repeating day view on the Rhythm screen, showing your focus and rest blocks as they will actually play out.

• Long breaks — a proper one to ten minute pause every few cycles, for the kind of rest twenty seconds cannot give. Pro

• Smart Pause holds a break back during full-screen apps, screen sharing, video playback and meetings, including audio-only calls where the camera stays off. Pro

• Postpone while typing, so a break never lands mid-sentence. Only keypress timing is read, never what you type. Pro

• Snoozing, to push a break back a little instead of losing it, and a daily skip limit of one to five so the habit still holds on a bad day. Pro

• A five or ten second countdown before the break screen arrives, so it never takes you by surprise. Pro

• Break screen looks: the frosted glass default, light, dark, any colour you pick, or your own images with optional blur. Pro

• Posture reminders — a gentle mid-session nudge to sit up straight, every ten to sixty minutes, with a preview so you know what you are signing up for. Pro

• Simplified Chinese, and completed German, French and Japanese translations across the whole app.

• BlinkBreaks Pro: one purchase, no subscription, unlocked on every Mac signed in with your Apple ID.

Improved

• Away-from-desk pausing was rewritten on the system idle clock, so it notices you have gone whether you were using the mouse or the keyboard. You now choose whether coming back restarts the session or continues it.

• Break timing runs on deadlines rather than tick counting, so a session survives sleep, wake and a busy Mac without drifting.

• Breaks appear on every connected display at the same moment, and the menu bar icon shows a paused state for every reason a session can pause.

• Skipping a break no longer counts as one you took, and snoozing counts toward the daily skip limit — so the numbers mean what you would expect.

• The menu bar now previews the next break using the same rule the timer follows, long breaks included.

• Lower idle cost: detectors only poll while a session or break is actually running, and the countdown no longer republishes itself every second.

Fixed

• Video playback detection reads real playback instead of an open player, so a paused tab no longer holds your breaks forever. Pro

• Meeting detection ignores unrelated microphone activity, and only counts a browser as a call when it is the app you are actually in. Pro

• Screen sharing no longer stays latched on after a capture app goes idle. Pro

• Typing detection works without Accessibility permission. Pro

• Sessions resume once a Smart Pause reason clears. Pro

• Time spent waiting out a meeting no longer counts as focus time. Pro

• Snoozing delays a break by the snooze duration and nothing more.

• Previewing a break always shows a standard short break, whatever is scheduled next.

• A session never auto-starts after unlock if it was not running when your Mac locked.

• The App Store review prompt only appears after you start a session yourself.

• Remaining time formats correctly at every duration.