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Timer-Tab

timer-tab.com

121 pointsvinchuco62 comments

In a pre-app 2007 world, this would have been a killer web app for the v1 iPhone.

Not sure why this was downvoted. This is an interesting and perfectly valid observation.

I would go even further:

A surprisingly high number of "apps" could be replaced with web apps, where "installation" of the app means the JS/HTML is cached in the browser, and "upgrade" means a new version is downloaded by the browser (e.g. due to changed ETag identifier, or whatever).

Moreover, these "apps" would have almost no access to personal user data, which may be bad for business, but is more often that not a win from the privacy and customer protection perspective.

Upvote for webapps, the sooner we come back to the web, the better we will be.

Strange, i'm trying to get further from the web.

As it stands, everything i do is web related in one way or another. From storage to home assistants to note taking and blah blah blah, they're all on the web hosted by someone else.

I know there are a few alternatives, but none of it really makes me happy. Currently, i'm trying to make my own home cloud, with a focus on simplicity.. but i doubt i'll succeed. I just know that nothing seems simple. I'm talking like, single binary "can't fuck it up" simple. Because it has to be stupidly easy to be used by my grandma, even if that means less features.

JS/HTML can be run on your own machine without needing any cloud or other external service. You could distribute the application as a single .zip file or something, like binary executables often are. I've seen people sell games this way.

Yep, this is not a bad idea but unfortunately browsers do not allow you access to local storage since they do not treat the local filesystem as designated domain paths.. which is completely super annoying & makes offline webapps a very temporal thing since they NEED a domain name cached before you can use them.

Note: based on my experience when hacking around with local app 2 years ago on Chrome and FF so things may have changed?

You can use node if you want those kinds of permissions. Or any other general purpose language with runtime.

Node is not exactly "can't fuck it up" simple.

The whole point of running and using browser apps is that they are guaranteed to be sandboxed - Node.js breaks this sandboxing 100% which makes it more powerful but also inherently a mess security wise. This mess can to a certain extend be accommodated on the server side but certainly not on the client side where code from 1000s of devs will eventually be run without vetting.

Good lord no. The Web is a terrible place. It should stay where it is and we should not try to take its terrible principles elsewhere.

Better in some ways, but certainly not performance!

WebAssembly might be a big step towards improving that.

It absolutely will. I've compiled like 30 projects to the web now and across the board I'm seeing 10x to 40x improvements in speed compared to idiomatic JavaScript. Here's one of the Benchmarks I ran:

Native: 57.26 ms

wasm Firefox: 143.35 ms

asm.js Firefox: 162.43 ms

asm.js Edge: 199.70 ms

wasm Chrome: 223.80 ms

asm.js Chrome: 268.60 ms

JS Chrome: 2898.20 ms

JS Edge: 3240.00 ms

JS Firefox: 5558.88 ms

When you say "speed" are you talking about startup (getting the page to a usable state) or crunchy ongoing work?

Nah, I'm talking about running an algorithm.

And here we are in a world where everyone thinks they need an app. I am 100% in your camp, the browser was the solution to multi-platform mobile apps.

Did it not come with a timer builtin? That seems like quite an oversight.

Don't remember those "iPhone vs rock" comparison charts? The 1 was a bit of a joke, it didn't have basic features that any smartphone at the time had (e.g. copy-paste).

When the first wave of smart watches came out I was shocked to learn that timers weren't core functionality.

Timer is so useful for me to check out my fitness level or just set a goal. If I can do a 400m lap under 60 sec that means I am good to go. Two minute plank, good to go. Five minute squat good to go. Apart from that timer is good for pomodoro, meditation, measuring heart beat or anything. I know of time when doctors can grab wrist and tell heart beat with so much accuracy. But today I see it going downhill. I don't need Cloud sync or any gimmick. I am sharp enough to keep data in my mind or if it so useful then I can go back and log it in Excel sheet myself. Putting so much emphasis on automation in a smart watch is a big turn off for me.

If you set a timer for 5 minutes and close the tab for 30 seconds, it continues with 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Very cool. The one thing I don't like is using youtube embeds for the audio notification. It uses more browser resources and data than seems necessary, and adds the minor inconvenience of unblocking the scripts.

If you look closely you can see the magic. http://giphy.com/gifs/timer-timer-tab-eeJNaxWXZGMO4

What do you mean?

The favicon gets updated.

I thought that was the whole point.

Just curious, what are your pinned websites?

2 is gitlab

4 is soundcloud

Those are the two I knew, I was curious about 1 and 3! :)

503 - Over Quota for me :(

It's very interesting in Safari on macOS when you switch to another tab. (I guess) You can see how Safari's power saving kicks in as the counter stops refreshing the tab title instantly after the 10th second and the next refresh is after 10 more seconds and the intervals of refresh increase as time passes.

That sort of things was the reason Android was bad at Audio I believe. "logic" first design backfired for time consistent needs. Also HTML5 music toys/apps had a hard time (sic) working when not in focus. It either slows down, has random tempo or just stops altogether.

It saddens me that we're living in an age where a static HTML / JS website ends up hosted on Google App Engine and can go "over quota".

It's a fancy looking timer/stopwatch? Am I missing something?

I think the updating of the page title in the browser tab is the main feature. Also, the favicon updates. So you can be doing something in another tab and see the timer in the timer tab.

Is it terribly difficult to update the page title if the tab is not in focus? I guess browser pauses js interaction with DOM if the tab is out of focus.

I use this to deal with setTimeout() slowing down in unfocused tabs: https://github.com/turuslan/HackTimer

Also, isn't a fancy looking timer worth posting to see if people find it interesting?

It puts the timer in the favicon so you can see it as a tab or bookmark icon.

The interesting part is the hack to get the timer working alongside the tab title.

This is quite nice to throw on a screen in the NOC/SOC. However I would have liked if it was possible to set the alarm clock via the URL.

I don’t do alarms, just timers, but my site does it like this: http://5.minutestocountdown.com/

One nice benefit of doing the number first in the url is that the second time you set a timer you can just type a single number and url autocomplete will fill in the rest for you.

Thanks for this simple tool, I'll definitely use it next time.

I broke it by putting in a non-integer number of minutes. Is this even fixable?

Cannot upvote this enough!

The URL feature would be really useful, especially if you put the UNIX epoch time in the url. This way you can send the timer to other people/devices, and you can also close the tab by mistake and have the countdown pick up exactly where it should.

I wanted this for a long time and ended up implementing it (proof of concept, not guarantees): https://epoch-timer.gomix.me/

Feel free to "remix" it: https://gomix.com/#!/project/epoch-timer

You can also google a timer or stopwatch, but it wouldn't have any favicon notifications.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=5s+timer

I like how you linked to a "5s" timer, but the timer is actually 5 minutes.

It looks like a bug! even changing 5s to "5 seconds" doesn't fix it

.com doesn't have this issue

https://www.google.com/search?q=5s+timer

DDG > Google*

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5s+timer

*at least when it comes to timers!

Neat, there's also: http://e.ggtimer.com/10 minutes

try again: your link goes to 10 seconds. (Might be an issue with HN link detection algo.)

http://e.ggtimer.com/10%20minutes

Seems they don't support underscores as a separator so you get that ugly `%20` URL encoding of the `space` character in the URL making it look like "20 minutes" (or "10 modulo 20 minutes")..

http://e.ggtimer.com/10min works fine too.

For everyone getting 503 Over Quota error, check WaybackMachine: https://web.archive.org/web/20161209044611/http://www.timer-...

In Chrome the Youtube video that is used as alarm sound won't play until the tab is active, so if you are not looking at the browser and catch the tab flashing red, you won't notice.

Very cool! I made a similar tool last year that I use for Pomodoro. The favicon tomato changes from red to green when time is up, and it only updates the title time once a minute, but I find that to be less distracting while I'm working.

https://roche.io/pomodoro/

I've been using this in conjunction with Alinof Timer from the Mac App Store for shorter deadlines (translucent overlay timer).

Pretty effective at keeping me focused when I'm exhausted/groggy.

I can't get the timer to function on chrome on android. The focus jumps around and the start button doesn't seem to work

If you could do (and you can), do several timers at the same time, some people actually need those things. Just an idea.

Perhaps add an option of using static favicon? Favicon flickers noticeably in Firefox when updated.

Does anyone has recommendation for terminal friendly version of timer app?

I like it!

The moment this page opened, this song played in my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw

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