Eye Defender Reminds You To Take Breaks

Martin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:55:14 +0000

It is not very healthy to work for hours starring on a computer monitor without taking breaks. Eye Defender was designed to prevent the Computer Vision Syndrome which can have all kinds of ill effects on the human body including eyestrain, blurred vision, delayed focusing, headaches, back and neck aches, dry and burning eyes, light sensitivity, distorted color vision, forehead heaviness, and sore eyes.

That is quite a few symptoms and better to be avoided. Eye Defender helps by reminding the user to take regular computer breaks. The software sits quietly in the system task for most of the time but becomes active every 45 minutes by default.

It’s up to the user on how he is reminded of the break, he has four choices that are offered by the program: Display a picture, run the screensaver, display a popup reminder or run the visual training that relaxes the eyes.

The break interval can be changed between 1 to 999 minutes but the default values are 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90 minutes and it is recommended to choose one of them. The break duration can be defined as well.

The most interesting break reminder is the visual training that displays various symbols and figures on the screen to relax the eyes.

Eye Defender runs on most Microsoft operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Tags: computer vision syndrome, eye defender, eyestrain, pc break, pc software, Windows

Organize your PC Breaks with Off 4 Fit

Martin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:22:46 +0000

I reviewed Workrave a while ago which reminded PC users that it was time to take a break to assist in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury. Off 4 Fit is another application that reminds the PC user that he needs to take a break. The difference between both applications is that Off 4 Fit is actually using animations to show a number of exercises during the breaks.

Exercises are divided into the three categories Eyes, Hands and Body each containing several exercises that do not take up lots of space, if any, which is ideal for work environments. Each exercise is explained visually by an avatar that is performing it over and over again as well as text that is displayed below the performance.

The first exercise for the hands for example asks the user to stretch his finger joints while the first body exercise is all about stretching the body for a few times.

Each exercise is repeated several times. Basic controls allow to pause, rewind or forward exercises at any time. The exercises are easy to learn which means that the animations are no longer needed eventually which should definitely be the first goal of a new user. It does not make much sense to exercise the eyes when you have to keep them glued to the computer monitor to understand the exercises correctly.

The other criticism that I have is the advertisement popup that appeared once talking about another tool of the developer that would scan my Registry. I have no idea on the frequency of those popups, it happened once during my tests.

The time before the program reminds the user that he should take a break can be set between 10 and 180 minutes.

Tags: break, computer, fitness, pc break, workrave

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Eye Defender Reminds You To Take Breaks

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