Today we focused on:
- Animation and more interactivity for the website
- Strong suite of options for the user through our preferences page.
We highlight our efforts towards these in this blog.
App
Yesterday we added options for fonts and sizing.
Today we went a step further and offered options for how the user can interact with the app.
Xander brought up some good points on how frequently someone may want to set a timer for a two digit number of minutes i.e. 10min , 20min , 30min .
To have as little friction as possible to do this, our set time mode — or input state — can be customized.
Customized in the sense that, if you set your input mode to MM then when you start the timer it will begin counting down that many minutes.
The default input state remains HH:MM:SS , and the user also gets the option for a customizable second input state that is activated on ⌥ + double click. This way the user can have their primary input state be HH:MM:SS and secondary input state MM for quick setting a timer for a two digit number of minutes.
The logic on the MM is also such that if the user selects a timer for 90 , then this is automatically normalized in the countdown to 01:30:00 in HH:MM:SS format.
More customizations such as adding fun metrics like your CPU and memory usage, your thermal state and your battery stats (remaining to full charge, remaining till empty, etc.). These are more like bells and whistles we’ve added which some users may enjoy :)
A short demo of some of these settings can be seen in this X post.
Website
Today’s main features were the “Try me!” arrow on the home page and adding the timer functionality.
We needed something to call out that the demo was interactive (lest users miss all the hard work we put into it).
I threw together the arrows in Affinity (we have one for mobile and one for desktop). It was simple enough to add them in with a little “Try me!” note in Excalifont (which is my favourite handwritten font at the moment).
I’m still not super happy with the layout, but it works…
The timer functionality was also relatively easy since I could copy the logic directly from the app.
One change we made was the specific timer sound. The app uses NSSounds which come with macOS, but we didn’t want to use that on the site for fear of licensing issues.
So instead, I found a close-enough sound on Pixabay, pitch shifted it down, and duplicated to mimic the sound of the default timer in the app.
To finish the demo we just have to add in the settings page! And after that it’s 'just' distribution.