Thursday, October 22, 2009

Firefox 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 status 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 and install it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45343

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

After the Firefox browser restarts, you will see an icon of a green clock on your status bar. If your status bar is hidden, you could show it by selecting menu View->Status Bar.



How does it work
- The clock icon on the status 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 colorful text to close it, too. Clicking on the URL will bring you to more Firefox 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 menu: Tools->Add-ons->Extensions, and click on the Options button of this extension.



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. You can set a value between 1 to 999 minutes.

- Flashing Duration: the duration of the flashing. You can set a value between 1 to 999 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. You can set a value between 1 to 999 minutes.

- Rest Duration: after this long, the pop-up window will be closed automatically. You can set a value between 1 to 999 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.

You can click on the Restore defaults button to restore all the timers to their default values.


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

2 comments:

  1. Great extension!!!

    Finnally someone cares about human health on a browser! I really love it.

    Here's a few things i would like to see:

    - in the alert, would be nice to have Some text and a picture advising what we should do in our break

    - Alert/Icon appearence Improvement

    that's all for now :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the support. Those are very good suggestions.

    ReplyDelete