Night Light
A downloadable circle thing for Windows
I have a problem with break reminder programs, which is that the reminders are always really easy to ignore, in that you can just close them, or kind of impossible to ignore in that they make it impossible to use the computer until you take the break. I may not have solved this problem, but I have created new ones. Night Light is a break reminder program designed to be possible to ignore but impossible to forget about.
Basically, if you actively use the computer (i.e move the mouse every now and again) for too long, a spotlight will appear around the corners of the screen and narrow in on your mouse cursor. The spotlight is semi-transparent, so you can keep working as normal, but it'll stay there until you keep the mouse still for long enough. The time required to dispell the spotlight is based on how long you left it there, so you can keep working beyond when you should take a break, but you'll need to take a longer one!
There's a second spotlight that isn't semi-transparent, and instead of activating based on your activity, this one appears at a set time of day and converges over a set duration. This is the origin of the name Night Light, and the first idea I had for this program: if you've got some set time that you want to stop using the computer and sleep, the steadly approaching circle of doom is a very unsubtle way of reminding you of this.
Night Light is designed to be straightforward and non-judgemental. There is no branding aside from a simple white circle, no words aside from the name itself, and no sounds, commentary, or time tracking. It's there to put a circle on your screen - the rest is up to you. Putting it like that makes it sound like I put proper effort into making it that way, but in reality it's easier to just make it minimalist.
Status | Prototype |
Category | Tool |
Platforms | Windows |
Author | twotwos |
Made with | Godot |
Tags | Experimental, Godot, overlay |
Average session | A few hours |
Download
Install instructions
It's a portable program, just extract the zip and run the exe. Keep the files together! The "debug" version opens a command prompt window that records the radius of the semi-transparent circle over time, useful if you want to make sure it's working or check the math. Don't click inside the debug window. It crashes if you do that. See the readme.txt for info on how to edit the config to set timing, etc.
For editing anything that's not in the config, I have provided the source code, which only works on Godot 3.2.1 mono, not any version prior or since!
Oh, also, the entire functionality of the program is a bit of a hack. It may not work on your system. It also breaks some programs, like Inkscape. Sorry about that.
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