Cherrola

Cherrola is a simple, but aggressive Pomodoro timer app for Mac OSX. It resides in the status bar, and uses a popup to notify you of a completed Pomodoro. It is not meant to be a complicated time-tracking solution, it has just one goal: to force you to stop staring at your screen every 25 minutes and actually take a break.

The UI is super-minimal, once you launch app from the status bar, you get a single button to start the timer:

Upon clicking start, the popup is automatically dismissed and you can get down to work. During your session you can see at a glance how much time you have remaining by looking at the status bar icon:

So how it aggressive? Well, when the session time is up, Cherrola forces you to take a break, by filling you screen completely with a countdown until the break ends - with no way to dismiss the popup or cancel the break. It does this because I constantly found myself ignoring the breaks on more "friendly" Pomodoro timers. This way, I have no choice.

Here it is during the break:

Popup

This project is based on the Popup project.