For the past few weeks, I have searched (off and on) for a decent tea timer application for use at work. At home, I have the scare-the-cats mechanical timer, but I need something a bit more unobtrusive at work. Strangely enough, I could not find anything. Or more specifically, I could not find anything that (1) worked and (2) is not awkward to use. KDE’s Ktimer makes you jump through too many steps. The Firefox extension Galculator has timer functionality thrown in as an afterthought and messes with the status bar text in an annoying way. Eclipse Tiny Tools would be awesome because I always have the Eclipse C/C++ development environment open, but it just doesn’t work. Countless other applications just wouldn’t compile and I didn’t feel like fixing Makefiles and “./configure” files.
Because of all of this, it ended up being faster to quickly code one up in JavaScript. Bonus: it works on any computer running Firefox (and presumably any other browser, but I haven’t done testing.) Bonus: it does exactly what I want it to because I wrote it. Bonus: it’s easy to sneak into firmware as an Easter Egg because it’s a single small file that runs entirely client-side.