A native macOS menu-bar app

Notice the pause.
Keep your place.

Ambient Reset turns breathing, distance focus, and movement into soft light at the edge of your screen. Your work stays visible. Your attention stays yours.

Open the private GitHub repository See the design logic

The repository is private during development and opens for authorized collaborators.

Ambient Reset showing a soft Arctic-colored Breathe in cue with time remaining and a Skip control.

Light atmosphere

Native macOS Local only No screen recording Click-through glow

The central insight

Most break reminders solve visibility by creating resentment.

Blocking overlays are impossible to miss, but they also break the very concentration they are meant to support. Tiny menu-bar timers preserve flow, but disappear when your eyes are elsewhere. Ambient Reset uses peripheral light as the middle ground.

Seen without being read.

Broad corner blooms register outside the center of your gaze. They never cover the document, take keyboard focus, or intercept a click.

Peripheral awarenessNotice a cue even when the menu bar is outside your focus.
Zero obstructionThe middle of every display stays clear and usable.
Safe on every SpaceNonactivating panels ignore mouse input across attached displays.

Soft outside. Specific inside.

The glow carries no text. Open the menu only when you want the exact phase, time remaining, a way to skip, or a different reset.

One-glance guidanceA short instruction and time are enough to follow the exercise.
Always optionalEvery cue can be skipped, paused, or disabled.
Five light palettesArctic, Pearl, Sage, Dawn, and Dusk stay coherent across menu and screen.

Active breathing cue in the Ambient Reset menu.

Ambient Reset settings showing five glow colors and three intensity levels.

Timing earns trust.

A reminder that arrives at the wrong moment trains you to disable it. Ambient Reset treats timing as part of the interface.

Count what matters

Active time, not wall time

Only time spent actively using the Mac advances the schedule.

Respect real pauses

Natural breaks reduce reminder debt

Step away on your own and eye or movement cues reset without ceremony.

Avoid collisions

Busy moments defer the cue

Compatible resets can be grouped, and poorly timed cues wait instead of stacking.

Three small resets

One quiet rhythm for a long day at the Mac.

5 min

Breathe

Daily exhale-focused cyclic sighing, guided phase by phase.

Once per day

20 sec

Look far

Shift focus away from the screen after sustained active work.

After 30 active minutes

2 min

Move

Stand or walk without turning the reset into a workout.

After 60 active minutes

Your screen is the surface, not the data.

Ambient Reset does not need an account, analytics SDK, notification permission, screen recording, microphone, or camera. It reads only the elapsed time since recent keyboard or mouse activity. It never records the events themselves.

No cloud No pixels read No key contents No behavioral analytics

Evidence, with boundaries

Promising habits. No medical theater.

Ambient Reset is a habit-support utility, not a medical device. The defaults are informed by research, while the product copy stays inside what those studies actually support.

Daily cyclic sighing

A one-month randomized study found promising improvements in mood and respiratory rate for daily five-minute exhale-focused breathwork. A short demo is not presented as equivalent.

Read the study on PubMed

Distance focus reminders

A small study reported lower subjective digital-eye-strain and dry-eye symptoms during 20-20-20 reminders, without clear improvement in objective ocular-surface measures.