LookAway 2.4.8 — Mac version

We’ve all done it — sat down to finish one thing and looked up two hours later with dry eyes and a stiff neck. Your Mac is brilliant at keeping you glued to the task, but it won’t tell you when to step back. That’s where LookAway comes in.

Pop it open and you’ll find a quiet helper that splits its time between short breathers and longer proper breaks. The app is clever enough to notice when you’ve wandered off to make a cuppa: it spots idle time and pauses the countdown or resets it, so you’re not nagged the moment you sit back down. A gentle sound marks the end of a break, nothing jarring.

If your desk stretches across multiple displays, LookAway handles that without any fuss — the reminder covers all your screens. It runs on both Apple Silicon and older Intel Macs that are on Ventura or later.

Playing nice with the rest of your Mac

LookAway isn’t the sort of app that demands the spotlight. It sits in the menu bar, does its counting, and keeps out of the way of whatever you’re actually doing. Notifications arrive through the usual macOS notification system, so they behave like everything else on your Mac — polite, dismissible, and gone when you wave them off.

It also respects your Focus modes and Do Not Disturb. If you’ve told your Mac to hush for an afternoon of deep work, LookAway won’t fight you over it. And if you use the built-in screen time tools or other menubar utilities, there’s no clash — it doesn’t try to own the menu bar or hog system resources.

Meeting detection now pauses without asking

Version 2.4.8 tightened up the bits you feel in daily use more than the bits you read about. The meeting detection got better at spotting when you’re on a call, so the timer pauses without you having to remember a thing. That’s the sort of change that matters when you’re mid-sentence in a video chat and a break reminder would’ve been the last thing you wanted.

Idle detection also got a polish. If you step away for a moment, the app is quicker to notice and less likely to count that time against you. The result is a break timer that feels less like a school bell and more like a nudge from someone who knows when you’re actually working.

One tip from the repair café bench: if you’ve grabbed the lookaway mac full version and it still nags you after a fresh install, check that you’ve given it permission to send notifications. macOS Ventura and later can be a bit tight-fisted about that on first launch.

• macOS 13 Ventura or later
• Works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs