Blink reminder apps and extensions compared

Blink cue or break timer: the difference

A blink cue comes often, every few seconds to a minute or two, and asks for one thing: a full blink. It has to be small enough to live with hundreds of times a day, so the good ones leave by themselves and never take your keyboard. A break timer comes every 20 minutes or so and asks you to look away for 20 seconds or more.

They answer different problems. While you concentrate, your blink rate drops to a fraction of its resting rate, and more blinks stop short of closing. A break every 20 minutes does nothing for the minutes in between. In Nosch and colleagues’ 2015 study, a brief on-screen animation, with people told to blink when they saw it, raised blink rate by about 7 blinks a minute. In a 2014 CHI study, a blur, a flash, a flashing border and a pop-up all raised blink rate, and people liked the blur best.

Many listings with “blink” in the name are break timers. This page covers the true blink cues; for break timers, see the eye break comparison.

Browser extensions

An extension can draw on the page you’re reading, so its cue sits where your eyes already are. The catch is that it lives in the browser: it can’t draw over other apps.

Dry Eyes Blink Reminder (Chrome) shows a small dot, a word, a gentle dim or a corner dot every 30 seconds by default, fading by itself, with a 20-minute break timer and snooze. Its listing says a Windows version in the Microsoft Store shows the cue over every app. BlinkGuard (Chrome) offers a glow at the screen’s edges, a card, a dim or a border pulse, with focus profiles and a 20-20-20 timer. Both are new, with under 20 users each when we checked.

BlinkPause (Chrome, Edge and Firefox) closes soft eyelids a little over the page every minute by default, or softly blurs it (Mist), or shows a small eye that blinks at you (Peek). It holds back during calls in a browser tab and when you’re away, and adds 20-20-20 breaks with a spoken guide. Its weaknesses: it can’t cue you outside the browser (breaks can reach you there only as an optional system notification), there is no Mac or Windows app, and it is new, with no store ratings yet.

Mac and Windows apps

A desktop app can cue you in any app, which a browser extension can’t. On the Mac, Skopia ($4.99 once) is a menu bar app built only for blinking: every 10, 20, 30 or 60 seconds it shows a corner overlay, a chime or a soft eye in the middle of the screen. It pauses while your microphone is in use for a call, during screen recording, in full screen, in apps you choose and, if you turn it on, during video. Blinks ($2.99, Mac App Store) shows a small window on a timer you set, without blocking other apps.

LookAway ($19 once, Mac) is mainly a break app, with optional blink and posture reminders as subtle animations between breaks. On Windows, dedicated blink cues are rare: apart from the Dry Eyes Blink Reminder app, most Windows options are break timers such as Stretchly and Workrave.

Webcam counters

Some apps watch for your blinks through the camera and remind you only when you haven’t blinked for a while. AutoBlink (Mac, free with a $9.99 in-app purchase) uses the Mac’s camera to count blinks and fades in a semi-transparent overlay after 3 to 10 seconds without one; the overlay leaves when you blink. eyeREST: Comfort Vision (Mac, free) says it monitors your face and pops up a reminder when you haven’t blinked in time.

The appeal is that they only interrupt when needed. The cost is a camera that stays on, more battery and processor use, and counts that can be wrong: tuned too sensitive, a detector sees blinks that didn’t happen, and too loose, it misses real ones. If you’d rather not run a camera all day, a timed cue is the simpler choice.

How we compared

We read each app’s own website, store listing or README on 11 November 2026, and took platform, price, cue, interval, camera use and quiet modes from there. Where a listing doesn’t say, the table says “not stated” rather than guessing. We didn’t rate the apps or test their accuracy, and no app paid to be listed. BlinkPause is our own extension, and its row includes what it can’t do.