Mandala · macOS 14 or later · alpha-3
A break you can watch being made.
Mandala is a menu-bar timer for macOS. Every twenty minutes it takes your screen for two, and fills it with a line mandala being drawn one stroke at a time. Nothing to read. Nothing to click.
0:04 / 2:00
0:04 / 2:00 · stroke 1 of 2
The screen becomes paper.
Everything you were doing fades out. What replaces it isn’t a wallpaper or a countdown — it’s a drawing that starts from nothing, in front of you.
No timer to stare at.
The mandala’s own progress tells you how much break is left. You learn to read it in a day, then you stop checking.
Then the last stroke lands.
Your desktop comes back exactly as you left it. Two minutes. No summary, no streak popup, no congratulations.
2:00 / 2:00 · complete
That was one break.
You don’t have to think about a single one.
20 min work + 2 min rest = a 22-minute cycle
an 8-hour day holds about 21 of them
scroll — the drawing follows you ↓
04 — Ink
Twelve drawings, ten inks.
Every break gets a drawing you haven’t seen, in whichever ink came up — same rules, different result. Every ink is a pair: a luminous version for dark breaks, a deep one for paper. Pick one, or let Mandala choose.
+ random per drawing · multicolor hover, tap or focus a swatch to re-ink the drawing
05 — Smart pause
It waits for you to stop talking.
A break never lands mid-sentence. Out of the box Mandala holds through calls, fullscreen video and Focus modes. Turn on the rest — screen sharing, screen recording, and anything on your calendar — in Settings.
Sample day · not your data
06 — Screen Score
A number only you can see.
Mandala scores your day out of 100 for taking breaks and keeping sessions sane, keeps a streak for showing up, and holds a month of history. Computed on your Mac, stored on your Mac, exportable as a CSV you own.
| measure | value |
|---|---|
| screen score today | 80 |
| without a break | 1h 0m |
| current streak | 1 d |
| longest streak | 1 d |
| history kept | 30 d |
| export | CSV |
From the app · 23 Jul 2026
app-stats.png · 474 × 652, shown at 300 wide
light theme — matted, pending a dark capture
07 — Gallery
Every break, kept.
Every finished mandala is saved. Not a log of what you got done — a record of the times you looked away. One click sets the latest one as your wallpaper.
08 — Enforcement
As gentle or as firm as you need.
Skip is there the whole time. A nudge, never a wall.
skip available · 0 s · default
Your breaks, your drawings, your numbers: all of it is computed on your Mac and stays there. No account is needed to take a break.
Leaves your Mac: one HTTPS request when you activate a license.
That is the entire list.
Take the next one.
7-day trial · no card · macOS 14 or later · one-time purchase, not a subscription