Your Personal Ergonomic Assistant
MacBreakZ is a sophisticated Personal Ergonomic Assistant designed to promote healthy and productive computer use.
The Menu Bar Item
A menu bar item, if you are wondering, is one of those little widgets on the right hand side of the main menu bar: the spotlight icon, the clock, your battery, bluetooth or airport power indicators, etc.
MacBreakZ 4 puts its own menu bar item into the menu bar:
This widgets displays two things:
- the elapsed time and the time to the next break
- the current activity level
The numbers that are shown are the hours, minutes and seconds that have elapsed since your last break. These numbers are adjusted for your activity level, e.g. they may stop going forward and then start going backwards as you take a short rest from mousing & typing.
Every few seconds, the numbers will appear in between square brackets (e.g. [00:15:00]). This is the time to the next break.
The color of the text indicates your current activity level, that is how actively you are using the keyboard and mouse (or other input devices).
When the text is green, your activity level is "safe", when it turns orange you are entering the "warning" zone. "Red" indicates the danger zone.
Your risk of developing repetitive strain injuries (such as inflammations, carpal tunnel syndrome, etc.) is strongly related to long continuous keyboard and mouse use. Even short breaks of activity (see microbreaks) of only a few seconds in between bursts of activity can significantly reduce that risk.
You should thus aim to stay within the "safe" activity zone and never stay in the "danger" zone for very long.
Clicking on the menu bar item will reveal a short menu of the most common frequently used commands.
MacBreakZ ships with two different user interface modes. When you choose the mode that hides the dock item and menu bar of the program, you will only see the menu bar item.
How To: Hide the menu bar item
You can hide the menu bar item by changing your settings in the Preferences...
How To: Customize the menu bar item
The information displayed and the colors of the menu bar item can be customized in the Preferences...