Streaks
See the rhythm without grading yourself.
A heatmap of your year, a weekly review pulled from the journal, and a streak number that doesn't punish you for taking the day off.
Version 1.1 · Now available
A Pomodoro that
respects your attention.
Breaks lives quietly in your menu bar. It tracks focus, keeps streaks, exports finished sessions to Calendar, and stays out of your way. No account. No analytics. No noise.
A timer designed for the corner of your eye.
Six focused ideas, executed with care. None of them shout, all of them compound into a workday that feels less interrupted.
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Lives in the menu bar.
No Dock clutter, no extra window. A small icon, a quiet countdown, and a popover when you need it.
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Tracks real focus.
Pick a focus, label each block, and mark the session good, messy, or skipped. Weekly review shows where the time went.
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Custom break ideas.
Edit the short and long break suggestions so the app nudges you toward breaks that actually fit your day.
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Calendar export.
Optionally write completed focus blocks to Calendar with the focus label, start time, and end time.
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Honest streaks.
A weekly rest-day budget, sleep recovery, and idle prompts keep progress useful without punishing real life.
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Global hotkeys.
Start, pause, skip, and reset even when Breaks isn't focused. Carbon hotkeys keep working from anywhere.
Designed for one job, sweated to the pixel.
Settings
Tune it once, forget it forever.
Durations, sounds, hotkeys, idle threshold, pause-day budget. Every option in one collapsible page.
From download to running in under twenty seconds.
Breaks isn't notarized yet. Apple charges $99/yr for that and this is a free side project. macOS warns you the first time only.
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01 Download
Grab the latest zip from GitHub. Universal binary, around one megabyte.
Latest release → -
02 Move to /Applications
Same as any other Mac app. Drag and drop.
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03 Right-click, Open
First launch only. macOS shows a dialog; click Open. Launches normally forever after.
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04 Skip the prompt
Or remove the quarantine flag with one command in Terminal.
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Breaks.app
Things people ask first.
Is Breaks really free?
Yes. Free, MIT-licensed, no in-app purchases, no account, no analytics, nothing leaves your machine. State lives in macOS UserDefaults under the bundle ID.
Why the 'unidentified developer' warning?
Breaks isn't notarized by Apple yet. Notarization requires a $99/year Apple Developer membership. Until then, right-click the app and choose Open on first launch, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Breaks.app once.
Does it work on Intel Macs?
Yes. Releases ship as a universal binary (arm64 + x86_64), so the same zip runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
What happens if I close my laptop mid-session?
Breaks watches sleep and wake notifications, then reconciles the timer against an end-date so it doesn't drift. Open the lid an hour later and the session is right where it should be.
What about idle time?
If you walk away for longer than your idle threshold, Breaks notices and asks whether the just-elapsed time should still count toward the session. You decide.
How do streaks survive missed days?
Each ISO week comes with a small pause-day budget. The first N missed days that week are absorbed before the streak starts decaying. Configurable in settings.
Can Breaks add completed sessions to Calendar?
Yes, starting in v1.1. Calendar export is optional and only runs after you enable it in settings and grant macOS permission.
Will there be auto-updates?
Sparkle remains on the roadmap. For now, watch the GitHub repo or check Releases. New versions are tag-driven and ship the same day they're built.
Where can I file bugs or request features?
GitHub Issues is the right place. The roadmap is a public Project on the same repo.