Enter WatchIt, a tiny shareware app that basically puts a Walgreen's timer in a floating window on your desktop. It counts down. It counts up. What could be better?
It's not as elegant as WatchIt, but it does have a "Mini Window" which is quite small *and* it responds to Speech Recognition. As strikes against it, Chimoo has a wonky UI with preferences divided between a drawer and the "Preferences..." dialog. Because of this, it took me a while to figure out that the alarm sound selected in Preferences... is not on my system and that's why the timer did nothing when it got to zero. So, check those Preferences... and play around with the speech recog. "Start" and "Reset" work pretty consistently for me, but "Stop" is harder to get right. For the purposes of Merlin's tip, though, "Start" and "Reset" are all you need! Did I mention that it's free? ;-)
Okay, so I appreciate Merlin's work and all, but frankly I think I've *wasted* more time than I've saved since I discovered his blog & associated iLocales. Anyhoo, here's a very cute dock timer which has a cool semi-opaque window for the countdown:
I found that the most convenient way to use it is to set the "Temporary Timer..." (under the Timers menu) to 8 minutes, and then when the timer expires, just hit cmd-T to recall the Temporary Timer. For some reason I can't get cmd-L to work to recall the last timer...
Oh yeah, and this one's free, too. ;-)
Finally, not really apropos of Merlin's tip is Fob (as in watch fob I assume):
This one is a lot more complicated, but for a stay-at-home Dad, the ability to have multiple countdown timers all going at once is making me drool. [Eeew] It has a fun, if gratuitous, UI widget so you can drag the hands of a clock to set the countdown times.
And yes, it's free too.
But don't forget, I *did* pay for Tinderbox, so I'm not a completely tight-fisted! ;-)
What I'm looking for is a "chess clock", where, if I am working on ~6 things at once, I can easily switch from project to project and record how much time I've spent on each. Something like:
Unix security :37 Look 3 1:21 study Perl :16 <-- currently user support 3:49
(the above is hours:minutes). So, if a user requests something (I'm in at IS/IT department) I'd click on "user support" above and it would start adding time to the existing 3:49.
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:35:03 -0800, davidmenges <david.men...@uchsc.edu> wrote:
> What I'm looking for is a "chess clock", where, if I am working on ~6
> things at once, I can easily switch from project to project and record
> how much time I've spent on each. Something like:
> Unix security :37
> Look 3 1:21
> study Perl :16 <-- currently
> user support 3:49
> (the above is hours:minutes). So, if a user requests something (I'm in
> at IS/IT department) I'd click on "user support" above and it would
> start adding time to the existing 3:49.
-- Edward Vielmetti
317 S Division St, PMB 218
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
+1 734 276 5910
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:35:03 -0800, davidmenges <david.men...@uchsc.edu> wrote:
> What I'm looking for is a "chess clock", where, if I am working on ~6
> things at once, I can easily switch from project to project and record
> how much time I've spent on each. Something like:
> Unix security :37
> Look 3 1:21
> study Perl :16 <-- currently
> user support 3:49
> (the above is hours:minutes). So, if a user requests something (I'm in
> at IS/IT department) I'd click on "user support" above and it would
> start adding time to the existing 3:49.
-- Edward Vielmetti
317 S Division St, PMB 218
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
+1 734 276 5910
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:35:03 -0800, davidmenges <david.men...@uchsc.edu> wrote:
> What I'm looking for is a "chess clock", where, if I am working on ~6
> things at once, I can easily switch from project to project and record
> how much time I've spent on each.
