Blinky, an app that watches you blink
A small iOS app that counts your blinks with the front camera and nudges you when staring at a screen has quietly dried your eyes out.
Blinky started from a real annoyance. I’d finish a long stretch at the screen with dry, tired eyes and realize I had basically stopped blinking. So I made an app that watches for exactly that. It uses the front camera to count your blinks in real time and shows the rate over the last 30 seconds, minute, and five minutes, then gives you a gentle nudge when you drop into the dry-eye zone.
The nice part is that all of the face and blink detection runs on the device, with no accounts and nothing leaving your phone. Version 2.0 reworked the whole thing around intentional tracking sessions instead of running constantly, which was a lot kinder to the battery and honestly just a better idea. What I took away: a tiny, single-purpose app is a great place to get comfortable with the camera and Vision frameworks without a huge project hanging over you.
Blinky lives at blinkyapp.net.