Built by one person, for people who forget to stand up.
Hi, I'm Gil Gottlieb, and I built Standup.
Standup is a macOS menu bar app that reminds you to take breaks — but only for the time you're actually working. If you step away for coffee, it pauses. If you're in a meeting, it stays out of the way. When it's time for a break, it gently fades your screen so your eyes have somewhere to go that isn't the monitor.
I spend most of my day at a computer, and I tried most of the mac break reminders out there. Every one of them had glitches — jarring animations, timers that kept counting during Zoom calls, preferences that didn't stick between launches, notifications that couldn't be dismissed cleanly. I care deeply about the small details in software, and it bothered me that something as simple as "remind me to take a break" was this rough across the board.
So I built my own. A useful break reminder has to track your actual work time, not the wall clock — pause when you step away from the keyboard, stay quiet when you're in a meeting. It has to be impossible to ignore without actually taking the break — no tiny corner notifications you can dismiss without lifting your eyes. And it has to be gentle enough that you don't immediately uninstall it.
Standup is my attempt at that. It watches your actual keyboard and mouse activity, tracks only the time you're truly at the machine, sits out of meetings automatically, and when a break is due it softly fades your whole screen so your eyes get a real rest instead of another notification to swat away. Every animation, every preference, every edge case — I sweated the tiny details that the other apps got wrong, because those details are exactly what made them frustrating to use.
I'm a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience. Standup is a project I've been working on because I wanted one for myself and couldn't find anything that fit.
If you have feedback, feature requests, or a bug to report, I'd love to hear it.