reminder to take a break - Mac version

I wanted to recreate the earlier "reminder to take a break" cron job script on MacOS. Asked Claude about it, and it suggested using launchd instead of cron, since cron jobs run without access to the display by default. After several rounds of trial and error, here is the method that worked.

nano ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.walkreminder.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

    <key>Label</key>

    <string>com.yourname.walkreminder</string>

    <key>ProgramArguments</key>

    <array>

        <string>/bin/bash</string>

        <string>-c</string>

        <string>osascript -e 'display notification "Time to take a walk" with title "Reminder" sound name "Ping"'; afplay /Users/yourusername/Sounds/Walk.mp3</string>

    </array>

    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>

    <array>

        <dict>

            <key>Hour</key>

            <integer>14</integer>

            <key>Minute</key>

            <integer>0</integer>

        </dict>

    </array>

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>

    <string>/tmp/walkreminder.log</string>

    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>

    <string>/tmp/walkreminder.err</string>

</dict>

</plist>

In the above, the schedule is to run once a day at 14:00 hours. For running every half an hour from the time the user was logged on, we can use 

<key>StartInterval</key>

  <integer>1800</integer>

instead of <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>

Or, in my case, since I wanted every half an hour aligned to 0:00 and 0:30 exactly, 

 <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>

    <array>

        <dict>

            <key>Minute</key>

            <integer>0</integer>

        </dict> 

        <dict>

            <key>Minute</key>

            <integer>30</integer>

        </dict>

    </array>

We had to use a Sounds directory which we had created, since afplay could not access the Downloads directory when run from launchd.

launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.walkreminder.plist

and test with

launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/com.yourname.walkreminder

Troubleshooting can be done with

plutil -lint ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.walkreminder.plist

launchctl list | grep walkreminder

cat /tmp/walkreminder.err