Flexible application to help rest strained eyes

If you spend your days working at a computer, you have to be sure to rest your eyes regularly. Eyes Relax, somewhat unsurprisingly, is designed to help you do that.

Once installed and running it will sit in the system tray, from where you can open its control window. There are a host of features for such a small program, and some that make it more useful than you might at first think.

For the normal user, it acts as a useful reminder that you should rest your eyes for a minute or two. Basic setup means it will remind you to take rest your eyes every 10 minutes for one minute, doing so through a little pop up balloon. If however you find yourself ignoring it, and straining your eyes anyway, you can change the settings. Instead of the balloon, you can blackout the screen (with a get out button!), which drives the point home harder, or even replace the desktop with another image. That should be sufficient for most people.

You can save different settings with different profile names, perhaps depending on your activity or who is using the machine. For parents there’s a great feature – a parent mode. Enabled with a password, you can set it up so the screen blacks out after a pre-determined period, and make the break inescapable without a password. There is a 30 second pre-warning that a break is about to come into effect so users have time to finish what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the curious user will note the program can be disabled without the password by using ctrl, alt and delete, then forcing Eyes Relax to shut. As ever, some supervision is necessary.

With its different degrees of forcefulness, Eyes Relax is a great way to help you treat your eyesight with respect!