photo credit: bensonkua

One of my new favourite applications is called Time Out.

Time Out is donationware created by indie Mac developer, Dejal. The program does only one thing. Every X minutes, it darkens the screen for a set period of time, acting as a gentle reminder that you really ought to take a break. That’s it. That’s the whole app.

The key is that it does it really, really well. You didn’t know that there were over a dozen ways that you could tweak the experience of having your computer screen darkened after a predetermined amount of time, but there are.

It may be something that is special to Macs because of the way they OS architechture works or is may be because a certain kind of person gets attracted the software and hardware look and feel. It’s even possible that my impression is prejudice based on my own failure to find equivalent apps on the PC. But it seems like there is a wealth of applications available from indie developers on the Macintosh that only do one or two things but do them really, really well. I contrast this to the kind of massive bloated suites of software like Open Office or MS Office, both of which feel kind of out of place on my computer.

Has anyone else noticed this? Mac people does your experience mirror mine? PC people am I just being obtuse?