It’s a problem we’ve all faced. You’re happily listening to a podcast or song when the phone rings or someone interrupts you. The track is paused, you deal with the distraction, and then get back to work. Only half an hour later do you realise that you never hit play again!
Although this isn’t an earth-shattering problem, a simple utility to combat this seemed like a great idea to me – especially one produced by the super-talented Iconfactory team.
Their Take Five application has been available on the iPhone for a little while, and today makes its debut on the Mac platform. Let’s take a look and see how it works.
In Your Dock or Menubar
After downloading and installing Take Five from the Mac App Store, it initially shows up both in your dock and menubar. Both of these locations include functionality, but you’ll find that this is predominantly a menubar app.
If you’d rather not have Take Five showing up in Dock, you can turn this off in preferences – something I did straight away!
Functionality-wise, this is a remarkably simple affair. If you’d like to pause the track you’re currently listening to, just click the menubar icon and then hit the big pause button. This will automatically pause your track for the pre-defined “default” length of time (five minutes).
Alternatively, you can click and drag the slider to change the pause duration if you want to choose something other than your standard default.
After clicking away, the menubar icon changes to a subtle countdown timer that ticks off the seconds until your music is due to start playing again. This is done in a way that isn’t visually distracting.
Ten seconds before the track commences playing again, the Take Five window will appear. This is an incredibly thoughtful design decision, and it’s vital to receive a short warning before your music starts. This gives you the option to extend the length of the pause if you’re still busy.
It’s Beautiful
As with anything that comes out of the Iconfactory doors, Take Five has a gorgeous interface. It’s an absolute pleasure to use, and makes the occasional popup a delight to see rather than an annoyance:
Take Five in Action
Tweaking the Preferences
Despite the fact that this is a very simple app, there are a few preferences for you to take a look at:
Preferences and Settings
First up, you can change the “Default Timer Duration”. Your needs may vary, but I found a five minute window to be perfect – almost always enough time for me to deal with a distraction and get back to work.
There are also various key combinations to control the app – you can show/hide Take Five, start/stop the timer, play/pause your music, or show and hide iTunes. Some of these aren’t directly related to Take Five itself but are very useful nonetheless.
iTunes Only. For Now…
The single niggle I have with Take Five is that it only supports pausing and resuming iTunes. For many people, this won’t be a problem – it’s clearly the most popular media player on OS X and many people use it exclusively.
I’m a big Spotify user, and play almost all my music through their app during the day. This makes Take Five a little redundant for me, unless I’m listening to a podcast. The same would be true for all the Pandora fans out there.
Because the application is powered by AppleScript behind the scenes, this wouldn’t be a quick fix for the development team. The Iconfactory have confirmed to us that it’s high on the request list, so we’ll wait and see what happens – it’s certainly a feature that I’ll be thoroughly looking forward to!
Until then, Take Five has still gained a permanent place in my menu bar. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and strongly expect it’ll be one of those utilities that – after using for a few days – you can’t live without.