Mater: a Pomodoro timer that lives in the macOS menu bar

The timer lives in the menu bar, not in a window

Mater is a minimal Pomodoro timer that lives in the macOS menu bar, and the whole interface is built around that placement. The features list calls it a small unobtrusive menubar UI, and the behaviour follows from it: the menubar icon counts down the minutes remaining, so the number of minutes left in the current interval is visible without switching to another app or looking at a separate window.

That design is the point. A Pomodoro timer is a tool you glance at many times a day, so the cheapest possible glance is the one that requires no window at all. The alternative, a small floating window, competes with everything else on screen and tends to end up hidden behind your work.

The project is MIT licensed, written in Swift, and described in the repository as a simple, native macOS menubar Pomodoro app. The repository layout backs that up with an Xcode project, a Mater source directory, a MaterTests test directory and an AppIcon.icon folder, plus a CI workflow badge and a release badge pointing at the latest GitHub release.

There is no home page and no separate documentation site. The README is the documentation, which for an app of this size is a reasonable arrangement.

Dragging the ruler changes the remaining time mid-session

The feature that separates Mater from a plain countdown is that the time ruler can be dragged in either direction while running to adjust time. You are not restarting the interval, you are moving its boundary.

That sounds like a small thing and it is not. A fixed-duration timer forces a choice when reality does not cooperate: leave it running and accept a session that was too long, or stop it and lose the streak. With a draggable ruler, an interruption that lasted four minutes can be absorbed by shortening the interval, and a session you want to extend can be extended without stopping and restarting the cycle.

The rest of the feature list is short and specific. Work and break durations are configurable, so the classic 25 and 5 split is a default rather than a hardcoded assumption. The menu bar icon counts down the minutes remaining. Keyboard shortcuts handle play and pause with the spacebar and dismissal with escape, so the common actions do not require the mouse. And sound effects for winding and button clicks, taken from snd.dev, can be turned off.

The sound option deserves a note, because a timer that beeps unexpectedly in a meeting is a genuine nuisance. Being able to switch the effects off without changing anything else is a small courtesy that the author clearly thought about.

Version 3 turned it into a macOS-only Swift app

The most consequential line in the README is the one about version 3: as of version 3, Mater is now macOS-only and is now written in Swift.

That is a rewrite rather than an incremental change, and it means the current program and the old one share a name and a purpose but nothing else. If you remember Mater as a cross-platform timer with a different look, the behaviour you are looking for is not in the current releases, and the platforms it dropped are not coming back on the strength of this sentence.

The release history is consistent with a rewrite in progress rather than a dormant project. v3.0.0 was tagged on 2026-04-13, v3.0.1 on 2026-06-22, and v3.0.2 on 2026-10-01, with the last push to the main branch the same day as the 3.0.2 tag. The repository is not archived, and the version sits at 3.x rather than at 0.x, so the early instability of the rewrite is behind it.

A Swift rewrite of a small app also buys something the earlier versions could not have: a native binary with no runtime to install. That is what makes the manual installation path a zip rather than a build step.

Installing is a Homebrew tap or a drag to Applications

Two installation routes are documented, and the first is the one most people will use. You tap the author's Homebrew tap and install from it:

brew tap jasonlong/tap
brew install jasonlong/tap/mater

The second route is manual. You download the latest .zip from the Releases page, unzip it, and drag Mater to Applications.

The manual route is worth a second look for anyone who does not want a Homebrew tap on their machine, because it is unusually frictionless for a macOS utility. There is no package manager state, no cask to update, and no dependency to resolve. The cost is that you now own the update process, since a new release is a new zip to download and replace.

The Homebrew route is the one to prefer if you want the app to stay current without thinking about it, since a tap installed formula tracks the upstream releases. Neither route involves an account, a sign-in, or a network service, which is consistent with the rest of the design.

The repository has no separate website and no documentation beyond the README, so the releases page is where the binaries are and the README is where the usage details are.

What this app deliberately does not do

It is worth being direct that Mater is a timer and not a productivity suite. The feature list contains six items and every one of them is about the timer itself: the menubar UI, the draggable ruler, configurable durations, the countdown icon, two keyboard shortcuts and switchable sound effects.

There is no session history, no statistics, no long term reporting, no task labels, no team or shared focus mode, and no sync between machines. None of those are mentioned, and a reader should assume they are absent rather than undocumented.

The alternative worth naming is a browser based Pomodoro timer or a general note taking app with a timer built in. The browser approach needs a tab and an internet connection, and it competes with the tabs you are trying to avoid. A productivity suite gives you history and reporting, and it also gives you accounts, notifications and a subscription. Mater gives you a number in the menu bar and nothing else, which is a defensible position for a single user utility, and a frustrating one if you want to look back at how your week went.

The same trade shows in the settings surface. Configurable durations and two shortcuts is a much shorter feature list than any of those alternatives, and it is the reason the app is small enough to be a menubar resident.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Mater if you want a Pomodoro timer that stays out of the way on a Mac, you want to adjust the remaining time by dragging rather than restarting it, and you are happy to have a single native binary with no account and no sync. Do not adopt it if you need the timer on Linux or Windows, or if you want session history, statistics or team focus cycles, since the feature set is a timer and its menu bar UI. Before you install, check that version 3 behaviour matches what you expect, because the README states that as of version 3 the app is macOS-only and written in Swift, which means the older cross-platform version is a different program.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. jasonlong/mater on GitHub
3. License: MIT
4. README
5. Releases