BBQTimer Android app

• Combined interval timer/stopwatch = periodic alarms + elapsed time.
  Reminds you periodically to turn the food while it tracks the total cooking time.
• Quick access via lock screen notification, pull-down notification, and home screen widget.
• Editable pop-up menu of interval times. Quickly access your favorite timers, each with optional notes.
• Changeable alarms while it’s running.
• No ads.

Type in the interval time in minutes, minutes:seconds, or hours:minutes:seconds.

Example intervals:

• 10 = 10 minutes
• 7:30 = 7 minutes, 30 seconds
• 3:15:00 = 3 hours, 15 minutes

Short forms:

• 12:00 = 12:0 = 12: = 12 = 12 minutes
• 0:09 = :9 = 9 seconds
• 2:00:00 = 2:0:0 = 2:: = 120 = 2 hours

Android Requirements

BBQ Timer is for phones and tablets running Android 5.0+ (Lollipop and later).

If it encounters problems on your Android device, email me the details (device model, Android version, screen size, problem symptom, Android "bugreport" file).

Usage Tips

• Tap the checkbox to turn the periodic reminder alarms on/off.
• Tap the time display to cycle between stopped → running → paused → stopped.
• Add the BBQ Timer widget to the home screen.
  • Tap the widget’s elapsed time to start/pause/stop.
  • Tap the widget’s background or its countdown time to open the app.
  • Resize the widget (long-press it then drag its resize handles) to see more or less info.
  • To remove the widget, long-press and drag it to “× Remove”.
• While BBQ Timer is running or paused, it appears on the lock screen and in the pull-down notification so you can see and control it in those places.
  • To put it on the lock screen, put it in Pause or Play mode by tapping buttons in the app or the home screen widget.
  • You can long-press the app’s home screen icon, then tap the “Pause at 00:00” shortcut (on Android 7.1+) to make it Paused and ready on the lock screen.
• Tap ▲ in the alarm interval text field to open the pop-up menu of interval times.
  • Tap “Edit these intervals…” in the menu to customize the menu.
  • Long-press ▲ to customize the menu.
• The app, home screen widget, and pull-down notification show the countdown interval time as well as the total elapsed time (requires Android 7+).
• In the app, the phone’s volume keys adjust the Alarm volume.
• You can change BBQ Timer’s “Alarm” sound in Settings - Notifications. Don’t pick “None” if you want to hear the interval alarms. To restore the app’s cowbell sound, uninstall and reinstall the app.

System Settings needed to hear and see BBQ Timer notification alarms

• “Alarm volume” at an audible level.
• Lock screen - Show all or non-private notifications.
• Settings / Apps / Special app access / Alarms & reminders / Allowed.
• Apps / BBQ Timer “Show notifications”, not Silent. (You may also choose to “Override Do Not Disturb“.)
• Apps / BBQ Timer “Alarm” notification category - “Show notifications”, not “Silent”, “Make sound and pop on screen”, sound choice not “None”, Importance “High” or higher to hear and see on the lock screen and in the notification area.
• Notifications / App settings / BBQ Timer / On.

License

MIT License.

Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC.

Notes

• There’s some clock skew between the stopwatch time as displayed in widgets vs. the notification area. To see more precise times, open the application.
• At Font Size Largest in Settings Display Size Default, the home screen widget’s text may get clipped at the bottom.

Building from Source Code

Use Android Studio (an excellent tool!).

Dedication

Dedicated to open source software developers.

Open source software used for this project includes: Android, Android Studio, ART, Audacity, Chrome, Dalvik, Gimp, git, git gui, Gradle, Inkscape, MinGW, Proguard, and much more that we use without thinking about, like libpng and zlib.

Don’t get me wrong -- commercial software is also great!

Media Asset Sources

Notification sound composed from sampled cowbell sounds which are used by permission from Phil Burk, Copyright (c) 2014 Mobileer Inc.

Keywords

BBQ, cooking, interval timer, home screen widget, reminder alarm, stopwatch.

Android programming notes

• The auto-size countdown text can jump upwards when the text changes or the soft keyboard opens on Android SDK 30 - 32. On earlier versions of Android, auto-text resizing doesn't always grow back when the text shrinks. The workaround is to set the height to 0dp (called MATCH_CONSTRAINT in the docs) instead of wrap_content + app:layout_constrainedHeight="true".
• Android 12 on Pixel 3 (at least) drops the initial "off" period from the notification vibration pattern, which makes it impossible to sync the notification's vibration pattern to its sound. Work around that by adding a tiny pulse at the start.
• To avoid flakiness, Espresso Instrumentation tests sometimes need delays or additional actions, in addition to turning off Android animations. Is there a better way?
• To get good contrast in notification text on Android SDK 24 - 26, use different day and night color resources. On Android SDK 23, color the mid-gray background area to get contrast with both the medium gray heads-up notification text and the light white pull-down notification text. The color setting carries over from a notification to its replacement so there's no way to consistently set different background colors for the two cases.
• The EditText and Material Design TextInputEditText widgets don't call their OnFocusChangeListener. Work around that with a subclass of TextInputEditText that overrides onFocusChanged() to call its own listener.
• Automatic focus in the text field on Activity start, app switch, or rotation is distracting and annoying, esp. with its CLEAR_TEXT (X) endIcon. So force it to defocus and reset its contents. Hiding the soft keyboard seems to be an unsolved problem in general.
• On SDK 27, double-clicking the EditText field would cause log errors FileNotFoundException: No file for null locale and TextClassifierImpl: Error getting assist info. On SDK > 27, something calls the TextClassifier on the UI thread, logging TextClassifier called on main thread because it can be slow. To avoid the delay and potential ANR, switch to the no-op TextClassifier.
• Making the home screen widget responsive to its size and screen orientation varies by Android SDK version. Android 12+ supports view mappings to switch between layouts without waking the app. View mappings and layout managers react to actual sizes. For Android < 12, use the onAppWidgetOptionsChanged() hook to respond when the user resizes a widget. It only receives the size range minWidth x maxHeight on portrait to maxWidth x minHeight on landscape, and it rarely gets called when the screen rotates, so it can only set a layout for the size range. Any finer responsiveness must be implemented by the layout managers and density/size/orientation-specific resources.
• Android's Split Screen feature can crash or refuse to split the screen, depending on the app's minHeight value, at least on SDK 29+. Tune the minHeight value experimentally.
• On SDK < 23, an icon in the home screen widget's background gets stretched horizontally. The workaround is to skip the icon on those Android versions.
• Show a large notification icon in API < 24 so Android won't stretch the small icon to a fuzzy large icon. Otherwise large icons are supposed to be reserved for cases like a user photo.
• When paused, a Chronometer view can’t show the right time value because its API doesn’t handle that case. A Chronometer also ignores its format string when stopped. The workaround is to switch to a Text view when paused. This app uses Chronometers in home screen widgets and notifications.
• Formatting the elapsed time like 0:12 would look nicer than 00:12 but the latter matches Android’s Chronometer view for consistency.
• The widget’s ViewFlipper must explicitly set android:measureAllChildren="false", otherwise flipping its subviews will resize the adjacent ImageButton on Galaxy Nexus Jelly Bean.

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