Back in July 2014, I made a small visual timer application for my PhD defense (45 minutes presentation in France, and then unlimited time for questions from the jury). It is a pure SVG graphic created with Inkscape, embedded in a lean html page, with some bits of javascript to control the animation. Also, it is meant to be fully responsive: it scales nicely on laptops, tablets and smartphones.
App update
This week, I've spent some time to update the app to significantly improve the useability. Beyond a strong visual refresh, key improvements are:
- full offline mode support: no more need of an Internet connection after the first usage. This is achieved using a AppCache manifest file.
- new pause/resume control button.
How to use the timer
This timer simply works in a (recent) browser: http://éole.net/timer/. On a desktop/laptop computer, using the fullscreen mode gives the best result.
Source code
The app is available under a CC-BY-SA license. Source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/pierre-haessig/visual-timer
Possible future updates
I may take the time to add the necessary manifest file to turn this web app into an actual hosted Firefox OS app.
Over the last few weeks, I've started to play with