BreakBuddy

A personalised break reminder utility built with Electron

BreakBuddy allows the user to create and customise an animated character that reminds them of when best to take a break

The character cycles between different facial expressions and animations (gradually increasing from lower to higher intrusiveness), which represent the time elapsed until a break should be taken. The break interval timer can be flexibly set by the user (default 60 minutes)

Consider (skim-)reading Breakbuddy.pdf for detailed information, which includes demonstrations, architectural decisions, and references

To do / in progress

• Extend and improve intrusiveness functionality - currently the intrusiveness just involves increasing size, transparency, a simple taskbar notification, and moving the character around
• Improve the taskbar notification - use different messages

Done

• Parse character resources via character_scraper.py
• Character customisation functionality and complete character personalisation screen
• Character is displayed outside of the tool when activated
• Input logging (for timer resets)
• Tray icon display - for when the Break Buddy is active, character creation can be re-opened via tray icon
• Complete timer functionality - user can select a break timer (20m - 120m), the character will gradually become more intrusive as time passes (changing emotions / transparency). If the user is away for 3m, the timer will reset

character_scraper.py

• This file builds requests to iteratively create and save animated characters - used within the app for character customisation
• The structure of a character is as follows: {male|female}_skin{0|1|}_hair{0|1|2|3}_{black|blonde|brown}_face{0|1|2}_shoes{0|1|2}_lower{0|1|2}_upper{0|1|2}_emote{0|1|2|3}
• Please note: female assets are identical with the exception of hair, which is hair{0|1|2}
• The assets are stored in character_resources/{male|female}.zip (decompressed size 83.9mb)
• If you need to rebuild the assets, please use the get_assets function, though note that a strong connection is required

Electron app - Development guide

First clone the project and unzip both the male.zip and female.zip files. Run npm install to obtain node_modules. Finally, run npm start to build the project. If you make changes, simply write rs in the console to recompile the changes

To compile the app into an executable program from a given instance, run the command npm run make - this will take a while. The distributable installer will then be located in out/make/make/squirrel.windows/x64

Local cache is stored at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\breakbuddy on Windows, /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/breakbuddy/Cache on OS X, and /home/<username>/.config/breakbuddy/Cache on Linux. You can completely wipe the folder to reset the app to the installation state (e.g., when you need to test data persistance)