HoldOn

One prompt, and a way to dismiss it honestly

HoldOn starts a 20-minute timer and then shows a single card: go look around. Clicking the menu-bar sun hides or restores that card, but only Done begins the next 20 minutes, so glancing at the reminder and hiding it is not recorded as taking a break.

The interface is the card and the menu-bar sun. There is no dashboard, no streak, and no score, because a break reminder that needs managing is another thing on the screen.

• A 20-minute wall-clock timer, started at login.
• The deadline survives sleep, a closed lid, and a locked screen.
• A filled sun is on, an outlined sun is off; right-click toggles.
• Only Done starts the next interval.

Why the timer is wall-clock

A countdown that pauses whenever the Mac sleeps drifts away from the thing it is measuring, which is time spent looking at a screen. HoldOn keeps the same deadline across sleep, lid close, and lock, so returning to a Mac after a real break does not leave twelve minutes on a clock that was not running.

That also makes the prompt honest at the moment it appears: if the deadline passed while the machine was closed, the card is due now rather than being silently deferred.

What it records, and what it never does

HoldOn runs entirely on-device and makes no network connection. It keeps a small rotating private log of its own interactions and Mac presence signals, such as sleep and wake, display on and off, lock and unlock, and whether a MacBook lid is closed, so response and visibility patterns can be studied later.

It never records screen contents, keystrokes, app activity, filenames, or network traffic, and it never uploads the log. The file lives under the app’s own Application Support directory with user-only permissions.

What is available today

The app is built and running, and the screenshot on this page comes from the shipping interface. The public repository can be inspected directly, and the one-command installer builds the latest source before placing HoldOn in Applications.

The local build is ad-hoc signed and runs entirely on the user’s Mac. There is no account, hosted service, or uploaded behavior log.