Coffee Break

What it is

Coffee Break is a simple application that is designed to force you to take periodic breaks, so that you can reduce your chances of getting a Repetitive Stress Injury. You may set an amount of "work time", during which Coffee Break sits in the background with a timer displayed, and an amount of "break time", or "sleep time", during which you are forced to take a break from the computer. For more information about how to use Coffee Break, see the on-line help. (From within Coffee Break, choose Help from the File menu, Coffee Break Help from the Balloon Help menu, press the Help key (on an Extended keyboard), or press Cmd-? to access the on-line help.)

Legalities

This documentation must be included with all copies of Coffee Break. Do not give out copies of this program without the documentation. This program is available for all non-commercial use, so please feel free to pass it along to your friends. It may not be sold for profit without the author's written permission.

Shareware notice

This program is Shareware, and if you decide to keep it, you should send in a registration fee of $5, along with a brief note, which should include your e-mail address (if you have one). If you like it, please do! You'll help me put my wife through medical school! :-) You'll also ensure that I continue to write more programs, and continue to improve Coffee Break. To register, send a check or cash (in U.S. dollars) to the snail mail address at the end of this file. Thanks, and I hope you like it!

However, the real purpose behind this program is to help all you hackers and other serious typists out there keep in good health! ;-) So, if it comes down to it and you for some reason can't register it, use it anyway. Health is the prime concern here, not making money! I'm trusting you to register it if you can.

System requirements

Coffee Break requires System 7.x. It uses strictly System 7 routines for it's background/foreground switches and other things. So, there's no need to even TRY it on a machine running Sys 6. It should run on ANY machine capable of running System 7, however.

The Floating Timer option requires System 7.1 or later. If you have System 7.0.x, you will not be able to use this option.

Some of the special features depend on certain screen saver options. Different screen savers support some, all, or none of these options. Listed below is a table of which screen savers I've tested with the program and what options (from the Set Options dialog) they support. For a complete description of these options, see the on-line help.

* note that while Darkside does not support the "Built-in saver" option, it does let you turn this option on. However, if you do, you still won't get any of the benefits of this option.

As you can tell, many screen savers DON'T support these options. I've tried nearly every screen saver I could find, and these are the only ones that are friendly enough to tell other programs of their existance. However, I've found that the ones listed above are the most widely-used screen savers.

Also, note that if you have Darkside, you should change the name of either Darkside or Coffee Break so that Coffee Break loads AFTER Darkside. If Coffee Break loads first, the screen saver options will turn themselves off, as they won't detect that a screen saver is installed. I'll undoubtedly try to compensate for this in future releases.

Introduction

This program was inspired in me several years ago (1993), when I became concerned about Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI). Since I work with computers both at work and at home, I'm setting myself up for RSI. I didn't want that to happen, but wasn't sure what to do about it.

I heard of a shareware program that would force you to take breaks at certain intervals, but I thought that that was a kind of stupid idea. Obviously, I've discovered the usefulness of such a program by now! Unfortunately, when I actually got a copy of that program, it fell short of my expectations. So, I wrote my own, and fixed all of the problems I had with it.

A debated option

One of the options in this program, the Restrict user option, was the source of much debate between my beta testers and myself. Some felt, as I did, that the program should be heavy-handed -- to protect against our weak willpower. However, others felt that not allowing you to quit or exit a break was going a bit too far. In an attempt to satisfy both parties, this option was added. It is slightly difficult to turn off, since being able to easily do so would remove any usefulness to the former group. However, turning this option off gives the latter group the ability to quit quickly and to exit sleep mode.

As a service to registered users who feel that this feature is too much of a temptation, I will provide a version of the program with this feature disabled. If you are a registered user and would like a copy of the disabled program, you may either send me an e-mail message requesting the program, or send a self-addressed, stamped disk mailer, a blank disk, and a letter requesting the program.

Known problems

This program doesn't work well when you're playing certain games. Many games must disallow other programs from getting processor time in order to have good performance in their animations and sound effects. For such games, Coffee Break will not be able to force you to take a break until the game allows other programs to get some processor time. (This can often be during a pause or in between games.) There is nothing that I can do about this, and nothing that game authors can do unless they want to adversely affect game performance.

In addition, one game (Arashi) uses the same method to tell a program it's covering the screen as the Coffee Break-compatible screensavers listed above. In such a case, Coffee Break's timer will remain paused as long as you're playing. This is obviously a problem, but there's not much I can do to fix this.

Credits

First of all, I'd like to thank Pete Gontier for his help in installing the AfterDark Gestalts. Although I still haven't gotten them to work correctly yet (partly due to the onset of the complications of PPC code), he helped me immeasurably with understanding the underlying process.

Thanks to Keith Rollin for helping me with a few other bugs, and for his invaluable suggestions.

Thanks to John Norstad for allowing me to use snippets of his source code from NewsWatcher.

Thanks to Matt Slot for writing appe Windows, which helped immeasurably with getting Coffee Break's floating window to work.

Thanks to Craig O'Donnell for allowing me to use a sound from his Cool Mac Sounds book.

I'd also like to thank all my initial beta-testers. They not only helped me iron out many of the intermittent bugs, but they also gave me many invaluable suggestions, without which this program would not be what it is today. Thanks to Derek A. Borgford, Flint S. Hahn, Al Heynneman, Devon Hubbard, Chris Hwang, Ken Linger, Kathy Peck, Eric Thompson, Sean Vadras, and Harvey Wong. You guys were a HUGE help!

I'd like to thank the numerous people on the Internet who have, at some time or another, answered questions for me about technical problems. I'd also like to thank the people who convinced me this idea wasn't stupid. (Yes, at one point, I thought the idea of a program like this was stupid. I obviously think differently now.)

Thanks to Metrowerks for writing CodeWarrior. Thanks to Hypercard clip art for providing the basis of some of the art in the screensaver portion of the program. Thanks to whoever at Apple wrote ResEdit. (And good luck on getting a newer version out! nudge, nudge...) Thanks to Apple for making the Macintosh, without which none of this would be here.

And, most of all, thanks to all my registered users, without whom I might have stopped all this at version 1.0!

How to contact me

If you want to send me a message through e-mail, you can contact me at ThomasReed@aol.com

For registration purposes, or if you don't have access to e-mail, here's my snail mail address:

Thomas Reed
1912 McCausland
St. Louis, MO 63117

WHEN YOU REGISTER, PLEASE SEND A BRIEF NOTE TO TELL ME WHAT YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS IS, IF YOU HAVE ONE.

Hope you like Coffee Break!

Also look for my games! Try Valley of Peril, if you're into adventure games! It's freeware, so there's no charge! Also try The Solitaire of Champions if you like solitaire games.