One of my favorite features of the Apple Watch is its hourly reminder, nagging you to get up and walk around for a minute. As someone who spends many hours a day sitting at a desk and staring at two giant screens, the hourly reminders prove to be of great help to at least pay some attention to your own health. Inspired by this, Stand for Mac is a brilliantly named Mac app that reminds you to stand up every hour.
Once enabled, all Stand App does is send a notification every hour, alerting you to get up. It displays an ‘Alert’ on OS X, which doesn’t automatically go away unless you press ‘OK’ on it. You can customize when you want to be notified during the hour in the app’s Preferences, toggle the sound on or off or enable Stand for Mac to launch at Startup. That’s all there is to it — it’s a really simple idea that’s well executed, at least for version 1.0.
However, I think the Apple Watch notifications actually work because it also lets you track your progress over a 12 hour period, which is something that Stand currently lacks. It’s very easy to just move your mouse pointer towards the alert, click ‘OK’ and get on with what you were doing previously. I wish the Alert had two buttons instead, a ‘Meh’ and ‘OK’ and the app showed me how many times I’ve ignored the alert, if that’s even technically possible on OS X.
Stand for Mac is available via a ‘Pay what you like to download‘ system and it’s a great way to support the developers.