Time Out is 20 years old

I just noticed that I missed a major milestone a few months ago: my most popular app, Time Out, a break reminder tool for macOS, turned twenty years old on July 10! Its first beta release was on July 10, 2003, with the first general release on August 18.

(If you’re curious, you can see the release notes for those initial versions, and every one since then.)

To (belatedly) mark the occasion, here are some screenshots of the initial version of the app.

Firstly, the original app icon was simply a photo of my hands forming a T shape:

Here’s a rendition of the app web page at the time; you can explore it yourself via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (though the archived copy won’t look exactly like this):

And yes, the exclamation point (!) was initially part of the app name.

When you downloaded the app, it’d appear in the Finder as a disk image; the most popular distribution method at the time:

On installing the app, you’d see the “lickable” Aqua-style General Preferences window:

Unlike now when you can have many breaks, there were just the two that are defaults now, the Normal and Micro breaks, each with very few options:

When you started a break, it’d fade the screen much as now, but without customizable themes or buttons:

These screenshots may look somewhat familiar; you can see the roots of the current app even in the first version. But the modern app has a lot more options, enabling you to customize it to suit your needs.

Happy birthday, Time Out! Going strong after 20 years — here’s to another 20!