Thursday, 17 May 2012
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About RSIBreak

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) is an illness which can occur as a result of continuous work with a mouse and keyboard. The risk of suffering injury increases the longer users work without breaks. RSIBreak simply offers reminders to take a break now and then.

After the start it will show up in your system tray and will monitor your activity. Whenever it detects that you have been active for a certain amount of time (configurable) it will prompt you for a break. It has some settings so if you walk away from your keyboard, it can reset the timers, so you will not be bothered with a break right after you return from that coffee break.

You can setup RSIBreak to popup a tiny notification popup to remind you to take a break, but you can also configure it to black out your screen so you can not continue working. All to your liking. As full screen work prevention methods, there is the possibility to gray out the screen, show a slideshow with your images or show the plasma dashboard (read only).

RSIBreak also provides statistics about the amount of time you actively worked, the amount of time you were idle, how many breaks you skipped, etc, etc.

RSIBreak is an open source application with a GPL license and is free software - both in money and in code. Its main developer can be reached via e-mail (toma@kde.org), whishes and bugs are usually implemented / fixed after you report them to http://bugs.kde.org - Or use the application to report them. At this moment this application is only for Linux/X11 systems.

Changelog

v0.10 2009-07-19

  • Use kdelibs function for display duration of a time.

v0.10-beta2 2009-07-16

  • Fixed all effects to work on xinerama
  • Fixed Plasma effect to work for KDE < 4.3
  • Fixed Slideshow effect
  • Fixed Welcome screen for KDE < 4.4
  • Fixed bug which resulted in multiple popups telling that the timer has been reset
  • Renamed No Full Screen effect to Popup effect
  • Renamed Gray effect to Black effect if no compositing is available

v0.10-beta1 2009-07-12

  • Fixed several porting bugs
  • Rewrote most off the full screen break effects
  • Some memory leaks fixed
  • Genral stabilization and improved user experience

v0.9.0 2008-11-19

  • Port to KDE4 and Qt4

v0.8.0 2006-10-13

  • Replaced DCOP dialog with a more flexible and standardized interface to attach events to breaks
  • Show where RSIBreak is located in the tray when started a second time.
  • RSIBreak now has a manual.
  • Option to only reset timers when idle for the duration of a long break.
  • Skip button in relax popup
  • Xinerama fixes
  • Images smaller than 1/3 of the screen will not be used for the slideshow.
  • Some tiny optimizations and bugfixes

v0.7.1 2006-06-19

  • fix crash on startup reported on some systems.
  • fix one of the icons.

v0.7.0 2006-06-19

  • New icons from Lee Olson.
  • Usability review from Tina Trillitzsch.
  • Two new DCOP calls: doTinyBreak and doBigBreak.
  • New statistics: percentage of activity during the last minute, last hour and last 6 hours.
  • Inform the user when the next break will be a big break.
  • Ability to make DCOP calls to the start and end of breaks.
  • Possibility to use KDCOP to set that up.
  • When no images are in the selected directory, a grey out effect will be used.
  • Possibility to break at fixed times.
  • Various smaller enhancements and bug fixes.

v0.6.0 2006-04-10

  • Extensive amount of statistics.
  • Colors to indicate how far away you are from a break in the tooltip
  • libxss for the idle detection is a no longer optional, it is required.
  • RSIBreak remembers the timer states when you quit. It can restore the timers if you restart RSIBreak afterwards in a short timeframe. This is handy for rebooting (for those zealots who believe rebooting solves problems).
  • Bug fixes:
    • For Gnome there were two Quit entries in the context menu.
    • Welcome message on first launch was incorrect.
    • Compiles with KDE 3.3 and probably with gcc 2.9x.
    • Memory leak while querying idle time.
    • Some buddies in the setup were not set.
    • Some i18n calls in the setup were not correct.
    • Clear focus from buttons to prevent accidental closure of a break.

v0.5.0 2006-02-22

  • Instead of a big break after x tiny breaks, the big break is now scheduled at x minutes.
  • Improved idle detection, if you dont touch your mouse/keyboard for one second, the timer wil also hold for a second.
  • dcop interface added for stopping/resuming RSIBreak
  • improved multihead setup: grab mouse and keyboard when slideshow is active, so you can not continue on another screen.
  • new tooltip code, which provides better and live information about the next big and tiny break

v0.4.0 2005-12-16

  • Added slideshow feature, during break the shown images gets renewed.
  • Image size is based on the screen size (for xinerama users).
  • New logo and icons.
  • Added possibility to automatically start RSIBreak when KDE starts.
  • Progress bar is shown in the passive popup.
  • The passive popup flashes when the user keeps working when he keeps working during the relax moments.
  • RSIBreak can be suspended. Rightclick on the dock icon and choose for Suspend RSIBreak.
  • This is handy when you're playing a game for example.
  • You can lock your desktop. In case you walk away during a big break.
  • Amount of activity is shown in the tray icon.
  • Extensive rearrangements, cleanups and bugfixes.

v0.0.3 2005-10-29

  • Change to KUniqueApplication to prevent multiple instances
  • Fix icon in context menu
  • Made minimize key configurable
  • Added popup to show RSIBreak is waiting for a break
  • Made a better layout for the settings of timings
  • Rewrote the timing logic completely.
  • Several fixes pointed out by Achim in his debian/rules:
    • ChangeLog.Summary renamed to NEWS
    • Desktop file installs in right directory
    • doc folder contains a DONOT_COMPILE entry
    • distributed png files were corrupt.

v0.0.2 2005-10-12

  • idle detection
  • improved the showing of the image during the break
  • Transparent counter during the break
  • Added ESC-shortcut to abort a break
  • Added link to bugs.kde.org
  • Added a welcome-screen

v0.0.1 2005-10-01

  • initial release