Now I will admit, I never bought Iconfactory’s Take Five for iOS. Don’t get me wrong it’s a beautiful app but I didn’t see myself using it that much on my iPhone. I’m so use to just using the volume controls or multitasking tray. The point of the app makes a lot of sense though: it’s aimed at letting you restart music that you paused and forgot to turn back on. I received an email a few weeks ago with the subject “Take Five for the Mac Beta,” I knew right away that this would fit into my workflow on my iMac because I get more sidetracked at home with my wife, kids and the television. So now when I want to pause music, I use Take Five for the Mac.

After launching the app, Take Five lives in your menu bar as a music note. When you’re playing some tracks in iTunes and need to pause the music, click the menu bar icon, then click the large pause button (or set custom hot keys) to start Take Five’s timer. While your music is paused, the menubar icon shows you the countdown. When the timer is done, your music will fade back in automatically. You can also use the dock icon (if enabled) to also pause and resume music as well.

The app is simple and efficient. It does one thing and does it very well - stopping and restarting your music so you don’t have to remember. It also wouldn’t be an Iconfactory app if it didn’t have a sexy user interface. It has many ingredients from the iPhone app but mixed with the flavors of OS X.

Take Five’s assignable hot keys can be configured for actions such as Time Start/Stop, Music Play/Pause, Show/Hide Take Five and Show/Hide iTunes – very handy if you’re a shortcut addict like myself. You can also change the timer duration from 1 minute all the way up to 30 minutes. I really like the option to “Track Change Notification” - the popup briefly appears when the track changes.

The Iconfactory has made a very nice iPhone app into a must have for every Mac owner. I highly recommend Take Five and for $1.99 (launch price) you can’t go wrong. Don’t pause, err hesitate, to grab it now.