Good idea, but doesn’t work

I just installed v1.6.5 on Yosemite. I was optimistic about the functionality of the app, but the break timer settings plainly didn’t work. I set to 30 minutes break, it ignored it and kept popping up every 10. I tried tweaking and restarting, but to no avail. I can’t have an app installed that dims my screen every 10 minutes when I’m trying to actually work.

Aside from this bug, which could be easily fixed, a number of small usability things got on my nerves. While not critical, the overall UX is substandard.
- The app runs in the dock, not in the background, and has no menubar icon. I’d expect a background app like this to have a menubar item, and not to take up space on the dock and command-tab menus
- Preferences are kind of hidden. You have to click in the dock, then hit command-semicolon. It should just come straight up, as the app has no other UI when it’s switched into
- The UI of the break screen as well as the preferences window are pretty ugly and I shudder when they come on screen
- I raised the transparency of the background to 95%. So much so, that I didn’t realise for a while that the app was (again) telling me to go on a break. It’s not just the bg that goes transparent, but everything! Including the buttons to skip the break. So for a while, I thought my UI was totally broken. Bad.

Overall this could be a great app, but needs a bunch of tweaks to the UI/UX to make it something people enjoy. I’ve seen a bunch of other positive comments, so obviously others seem to like it more than I did.

Rónán about Time Out - Break Reminders