DejalNews #90: Time Out 3.0 now available

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This is DejalNews, an occasional newsletter from Dejal.

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It’s been a while since the last DejalNews newsletter (over a year!), so I expect I’ll get several unsubscribes from people who forgot they signed up, or are no longer interested, or were added by spammers (I just spent an hour clearing out about a thousand obvious junk emails). I really should publish these a little more often. Lots of updates coming this year, so I probably will.

Time Out 3.0 released

The big news is that Time Out version 3.0 is now available! This major update to my popular break reminder app for Mac includes several huge improvements:

Time Out now requires a minimum of macOS Tahoe (26.0), and has been updated to support Liquid Glass, modern icons, and other recent technologies.

New theme editor, making it easier than ever to add custom themes.

New YouTube, Images, and Text theme types, joining the existing Local HTML and remote Website types.

Exclusions are now Rules, and more powerful, including enhancements to app rules, new fullscreen rule, customizable script-based rules including detecting when in a meeting, and more.

Added a Duplicate Break command.

Enhanced the postpone/skip control limits option to per break, hour, or day.

Improved data format, to support syncing in a future update.

Plus many other changes.

Read the blog post for full details.

New and updated themes for Time Out

Prior to the Time Out 3.0 release, I had updated several break themes, including updating and adding several YouTube-based themes, and adding a checklist theme. These are bundled with Time Out 3.0, so no need to download them manually if you update to that version… but if you have to remain on version 2.9.7 due to using an older OS version, you can download those themes from the Time Out Extras page.

Simon tip: How can I look for changes in a large binary file on a site?

I previously published a Simon tip, based on a customer query. They wanted to detect when a large binary file like an app changes on a website. While Simon could download the file, I came up with a better solution.

Check out this blog post for the details.

Time Out tip: The Calm theme can’t log in; how can I still use Calm?

For people who use the Calm.com website, they made a change that makes it harder to use during a Time Out break. But I came up with a way around that.

Check out this blog post for the details.

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– David