Digital Eye Strain Helper

A small Windows desktop app that reminds you to rest your eyes, based on the 20-20-20 rule (every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds). It sits in the system tray, shows a desktop notification on a configurable interval, can play a sound of your choice, and has a brightness slider. It was written as a student/coursework project to practise building a GUI application in Python.

Features

• Start/stop reminder timer with a configurable interval (1-60 minutes) and custom message
• Desktop notifications, optionally with an uploaded .wav/.mp3 sound
• Optional "start the reminder when mouse activity is detected" mode
• Screen brightness slider
• System tray icon (show/exit) so it can run in the background
• Settings are saved to a local JSON file on exit and validated on load

Stack

• Python 3, Tkinter with ttkbootstrap for theming
• plyer (notifications), pygame (sound), pystray + Pillow (tray icon)
• pynput (mouse activity), screen-brightness-control (brightness)

Running

python -m venv venv
# Windows:
venv\Scripts\activate
# macOS/Linux:
source venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt
python src/App.py

On first run the app creates src/config/config.json with default settings and writes eye_strain.log in the working directory. Both are git-ignored.

Project layout

• src/App.py - main window, reminder loop, tray icon, settings persistence
• src/Utilities.py - input validation, sound upload/selection, config load/save
• src/assets/ - tray icon and sample notification sounds

Status

Hobby project; tested only on Windows. Brightness control and notifications depend on platform support.