Nathan Wituk

Mac app · Free

Brain Break Banner

A banner plane flies across your menu bar when it's time for a break.

Download for Mac

The problem

Break reminders are built to be dismissed.

I spend long stretches prompting Claude and forget to stop. Every reminder I tried was a notification to swipe away or a pop-up to close unread. I wanted one I'd enjoy seeing: never in my way, impossible to miss.

The idea

A banner plane, like the ones over a beach.

  1. No pop-up

    It tows the reminder through the menu bar, the one strip of screen I'm never using.

  2. Two triggers

    Every few minutes or hours, or every few thousand words I send to Claude. Words are counted, never stored.

  3. It crashes

    On a MacBook, the notch is a rock. On a screen without one, the engine sputters out.

The grave

A crash needs a grave.

The joke is also the button. Click the stone and the break starts. Hover and a small × lets you skip. Ignore it and it fades after 30 seconds.

A low-poly gravestone reading RIP, Take 15

The break

Every break leaves a garden.

A little car drives the Dock from the first icon to the last. It's the progress bar. Grass unrolls behind it and trees pop up as it goes.

Preferences

A setting you can read out loud.

The whole window is one sentence. Change the unit and the number follows. 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'm a designer. Claude Code wrote the Swift.

I'd never shipped a Mac app. So I directed, the way I'd work with an engineer, and kept the loop short enough to run 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

The first version of every idea was wrong in a useful way.

Dim, then sky

The first flight dimmed the menu bar, and it felt like an error. A blue sky with blurred icons feels like weather.

White plane, then red

A white plane vanished against the screen as it fell. Red read instantly. Then I drew the final plane.

Counted on send, then live

Set to 250 words, 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 with only the goals and the code. It reviewed the app at 8 checkpoints. Every finding got a written reply: fixed, disagreed with a reason, or a question for me.

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

The build that quietly failed

For three updates, nothing I tested changed. One line was failing Swift's strictest check, and Xcode kept running the last good copy. The fix took a minute. Now I confirm the build worked before I judge a design.

Download

A crash and a gravestone got me to take more breaks than any notification did.

Download for Mac

Free · macOS Tahoe 26 · Signed and notarized by Apple