Take a Break

Showing the problem
Offering a solution
Main screen
Sharable image

Inspiration

My wife, a newly minted interior designer, spends hours hunched over her computer, too absorbed to remember to rest. She isn’t a “tech person,” so having to manually set alarms or reminders simply won’t work for her. That got me thinking: how can we nudge people into mindful breaks without asking for extra effort?

What It Does

Customizable Reminders: Users build a schedule of one-off or recurring reminders, choosing days of the week and specific times.
Push Notifications: At the appointed moment, you will receive a notification reminding you to take a break.
Quick Activity Suggestions: Tapping the notification opens the app and offers a brief, restorative action (stretch, step outside, listen to music, call a loved one, etc.).

How We Built It

SwiftUI for a fully native, declarative interface.
iOS UserNotifications framework to schedule, update, and cancel local notifications.
iCloud via CloudKit to persist reminders across devices and app launches.
Iterated on AI tools (Cursor, ChatGPT) for boilerplate, but ultimately hand-crafted the core logic for reliability.

Challenges We Ran Into

Syncing Data & Notifications: Keeping the in-app list in perfect step with scheduled notifications required a robust design, especially when editing or deleting individual alerts.
CloudKit: Integrating a custom CloudKit container for backward compatibility (iOS 16+) took time to get right.
AI Limitations: Early builds generated stray or duplicate files. It was faster and more predictable to code core features myself.

What We Learned

The main takeaway from this project is less about specific code and more about how far AI can take you. I know it is highly dependent on many aspects like service, model, version, and even the mood of the AI, but for me, it is much more of one more tool than something that does the work for me.