The eye protection alarm pops up for a few seconds from time to time - say for thirty seconds every twenty minutes.

It helps avert computer vision syndrome - the short term tiredness you get in the eyes if you spend long periods of time looking at a computer monitor. We tend to blink less than usual, so it helps if one looks away - and perhaps deliberately blink slowly a few times as well (relaxing the eyelids as if about to go to sleep to wet the eyes)..

One's eyes may also find it harder to focus on a computer screen than on a piece of paper - they may work harder to keep it in focus. So it helps if they can rest from time to time as you work.

For more on this, see the wikipedia article, Computer Vision Syndrome, also the Mayo Clinic page on dry eyes and the All About Vision Computer Vision Syndrome page and their Q & A.

You can choose various types of reminders. You can set the screen border to flash, or the activity timer icon to flash, or play a short tune every time. You can also show the Activity Timer splash screen as a reminder:

If one is very focused on the work, sometimes one may feel the need to be forcibly interrupted, and actually get the screen blanked out so that you have to stop, as it is easy to continue to work through the other alarms. The splash option does that to some extent, though you can easily dismiss it with a click.

You may also want to try the option to start up the Lissajous 3D screen saver (it doesn't have to be selected as your desktop screen saver).

This starts up straight away, in the middle of your typing, and blanks out the screen with a screen saver - so you have no choice, you have to stop whatever you are doing right away - just momentarily as you know it is only for half a minute or so. The screen saver runs for a short while. When it stops you resume work again.

If you really need to, you can dismiss it by pressing the escape key. So you know you can dismiss it, and you know it is only for a few seconds, so may find that works quite well, you just let it run.

Here is Lissajous 3D as it looks when it interrupts my typing:

There the pattern in the background is swirling. The reminder appears for a few seconds then you just see the swirling Lissajous pattern. If you continue to type then the screen saver message there changes to tell you what key to press to dismiss it if you want.

If you do nothing at that point, then the message disappears, you see the swirling patterns, and at that point you need to try to remember to blink and look away in the distance or do whatever eye exercises you do. Then after a few seconds (or however long you set it to run) then it goes away and you can resume your work where you left off.

You can use any other screen saver in this way - but it should be one that can be configured to ignore mouse movement and key presses apart from e.g. escape - otherwise if you are working at the time then your next key press or mouse move obviously will dismiss it.

Lissajous 3D is especially designed to work well when used in this way with Activity Timer. So, for instance it shows the reminder messages shown above when started from Activity Timer (other screen savers wouldn't show them).

That is just by necessity, that the easiest way to get this new option in Activity Timer up and running is to adapt my own screen saver to work with the program. It is not by design. If the programmer for another screen saver wants to be able to configure it to work in the same way with Activity Timer, then just let me know, and I will be delighted to do what I can to get the programs to work together.

Freeware / Shareware status: The alarms that come with the program - musical alarms, flashing icon, splah, and flashing border - are free. The Lissajous 3D screen saver is shareware.

To get the program, download and install Activity Timer.

Download Activity Timer

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