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.
