FAQ

I received a support email from a Simon customer who had a hard drive failure, and lost their data. Worse still, they were in the process of recreating their Time Machine backup at the time, so didn't have a backup.

That prompted me to post about my backup strategy. When you live your life and make your living on computers, there is little more valuable than the data they contain. So it is critical to protect it from a loss that could set you back years.

Fortunately nowadays most important data is in the cloud... various remote servers. For example, if you use Apple Music, your music…

If you send an email to Dejal asking for support, you should expect a reply within 24 hours. If you don’t get one, chances are your email service has mis-flagged it as spam. So check your spam folder.

If you use the contact form, and request a reply, you will get an automated reply email from the Dejal server within minutes, acknowledging receipt. And will get a personal reply within 24 hours, if needed. So if you don’t get that automatic reply, again check your spam folder.

I know it’s frustrating to write to a company and not get a reply. As an indie developer, I strive to provide excellent…

The direct edition (available from this site), the Mac App Store edition, and the Setapp edition are very similar, but there are a few minor differences:

Download

The direct edition can be downloaded from this site.

The Mac App Store edition can be downloaded from the App Store app.

The Setapp edition can be downloaded from the Setapp app.

Installation

The direct edition will download to your Downloads folder, so simply drag it into your Applications folder to install.

The Mac App Store edition will be downloaded directly into the Applications folder.

The Setapp edition will be downloaded…

Look in your Dock and menu bar; does Time Out appear more than once?

If it's in the Dock more than once, you can long-click or right-click on the Dock icon to display the Dock menu for the app, then choose Options ▸ Show in Finder to reveal the app in the Finder. Do this for each to find the one that shouldn't be there — it could be in your Downloads folder, or in a subfolder of Applications if you installed both from the Dejal site and the Mac App Store.

Once you find the duplicate, quit that app (by double-clicking the app icon to bring it to the front, then press ⌘Q), then move it to the…

If no break appears when you manually start one, or as scheduled, there are a few possibilities. Try each of these until the issue is resolved.

1. Firstly, look in the sidebar; it should indicate why a break didn’t occur.
2. Go to the Break Info page, expand the Overview and ask Apple Intelligence why the break didn't occur; it may be able to help.
3. Go to the Advanced page and choose Time Out instead of Separate Helper for the break.
4. Restart your Mac. That often fixes wackiness.
5. If that doesn’t help, make sure you don’t have more than one copy of Time Out.
6. If still no luck, there may be a permissions…

"Natural breaks" are when the Mac is not being used; idle.

By default, Time Out will wait briefly then count backwards when you are having a natural break, to give you credit for not using your computer.

If you do a lot of reading on-screen, that doesn't cause keyboard or mouse activity, you can change the app to disable this behavior by choosing Continue Countdown from the popup menu on the Break Schedule page of the settings.

Or if you'd prefer to have it just pause the countdown, instead of counting backwards, or reset the timer, those are also options.

You can quickly check any notifier in Simon by going to the Notifiers page, then choosing File ▸ Notify Now, or clicking the reload toolbar button when on that page.

Simon will perform the notification with placeholder variable values, so for the Email notifier, it will send the message, if set up correctly.