Vitamin-R 4.14

Improve productivity with a timer €27.95 (about £30) FROM publicspace.net NEEDS macOS 10.14 or later

Vitamin-R takes the Pomodoro technique of breaking down work into manageable chunks, and expands on it with extensive customisation.

There’s a new compact mode which reduces information displayed to the objective and the duration of the time slice. Alternatively, you can display every piece of info available, including appointments pulled from Calendar, and then ‘switch off’ those you don’t need one at a time. There’s also a ‘dock-less’ mode. This relies on another of Vitamin-R’s stengths, its keyboard shortcuts, dozens of which enable you to quickly navigate and make selections.

The latest version adds objective parsing. Type the objective for the next time slice followed by the length of time you want to spend on it and add some tags. Then, when you use the keyboard shortcut, that string of text will be converted to an objective, with the time set and tags added.

You can type the objective in Vitamin-R’s objective window, its Scratch Pad (one of three, the others being Now and Later), or in any text editor. And because shortcuts work globally, whichever text editor you type it into, once you’ve copied it, you use the same keyboard shortcut to send it to Vitamin-R for parsing.

Vitamin-R’s simplicity belies its wealth of features and options. Kenny Hemphill

You can view as much or as little information as you want in the main Vitamin-R window.