Nathan Wituk

Mac app · Free

Brain Break Banner

A sleigh flies across your menu bar when it's time to take a break.

Download for Mac

The problem

A normal reminder doesn't cut it.

I spend long stretches prompting Claude and forget to stop. I tried reminders, but sometimes Do Not Disturb is on, and sometimes I swipe them away without reading. I wanted something visual I couldn't ignore.

The idea

A sleigh that brings you a break.

  1. No pop-up

    It flies through the menu bar, the one part of the screen I'm never using.

  2. Two triggers

    Every few minutes or hours, or every few thousand words I send to Claude. It counts the words. It never saves them.

  3. It drops a present

    On a MacBook, the notch knocks the present off the sleigh and it lands on your Dock.

The present

The present is the button.

It lands on your Dock with a little tree. Hover to see how long, click to start your break, or hit the small × to skip. Ignore it and it's gone in 30 seconds.

A wrapped blue present next to a small Christmas tree

The break

Every break grows a little garden.

A tiny car drives across your Dock, and that's the progress bar. Grass rolls out behind it and trees pop up as it goes.

Preferences

Settings you can read out loud.

The whole window is one sentence. Change the unit and the number changes with it. Pick Words and a new line slides in.

Custom MessagingSoon
Fly every
written in
then take
6breaks taken
25mon break
1 dayin a row (best 1)
1,231words sent to Claude
13prompts sent
On1,298 Words

Try it: type a number, open a menu, or switch to Analytics.

How I built it

I designed it. Claude Code wrote the Swift.

I'd never made a Mac app before. So I worked with Claude the way I'd work with an engineer, over and over, many times a day.

  1. DescribeA Figma mockup or a screen recording of what I wanted.
  2. BuildClaude Code writes the Swift in the cloud.
  3. TryI pull it into Xcode and use it on my MacBook.
  4. NotesScreenshots and notes go back. Repeat.
1 dayfrom nothing to daily use
45commits
~4,000lines of Swift

What changed

My first version of every idea was wrong, and that helped.

Dim, then sky

The first flight dimmed the menu bar, and it felt like something broke. A blue sky with blurry icons feels like weather.

Plane, then sleigh

Version one flew a red plane that crashed into the notch and left a grave. Now a sleigh drops off a present. The plane is still in there as Classic Plane.

Counted on send, then live

I set it to 250 words and it flew at 1,900. Reading the message box live fixed it, with a 2 second pause so it never cuts in mid sentence.

A second opinion

A reviewer that never saw our chat.

I set up a second AI that only got the goals and the code. It reviewed the app at 8 checkpoints, and every note got a reply: fixed, disagreed and why, or a question for me.

70review findings
3of them must-fix
152automated tests

The build that quietly failed

For three updates, nothing I tested actually changed. One line was failing Swift's strictest check, so Xcode kept running the last version that worked. The fix took a minute. Now I make sure the build worked before I judge the design.

What I'd change

So far, I'm the only one using it.

It started as a class project. If I kept going, here's what I'd add.

  1. More apps

    Right now it only counts words in Claude. I'd make it work in more of the apps I use.

  2. Active screen time

    It would know when my mouse or keyboard has been moving for a while, and send the sleigh then.

Download

Something on my screen I can't ignore. Go take a break.

Download for Mac

Free · macOS Tahoe 26 · Signed and notarized by Apple