Copyright (C) 2012-2014 A.T.Brask atbrask@gmail.com
This is a self-contained countdown timer for our Tech Talk Tuesdays at OSAA (Open Space Aarhus - http://www.osaa.dk ). It has been implemented from scratch in SVG and Javascript with a dash of embedded CSS and HTML 5. It's totally over-engineered because that's fun to do. The goal was to see whether a single SVG file could contain everything needed for running a simple application like this. Turns out it could!
###The Setup at Open Space Aarhus###
- An old laptop mounted on the wall
- An ATI Remote Wonder for remote controlling the thing.
###Usage### The timer has several states, each with its own user interface. Any input device that can act as a keyboard is usable for this.
####Logo Screen####
- Press 'B' to go to Wallclock Mode.
- Press 'D' to go to the Configuration Screen.
####Configuration Screen####
- Press 0..9 and the arrow keys to set the time.
- Press 'D' to start the timer
- Press 'C' to go to the Logo Screen
####Running Timer####
- Press 'D' to pause the timer.
- Press 'C' to cancel the timer.
- When there's 5 minutes left, a warning sound is played.
- When time's up, the alarm goes off.
####Paused Timer####
- Press 'D' to resume the countdown.
- Press 'C' to cancel the timer.
####Wallclock Mode####
- Press 'C' to go back to the Logo Screen.
###How to Build the Final SVG File### One of my "dogma rules" for this project is that the SVG file must be entirely self-contained. Therefore, we need to embed the font and the audio clips in the SVG at Base64-encoded data URLs. This makes editing the file very cumbersome, so I have made another solution.
While editing and debugging the code, one has these files to work with:
- t3timer-dev.svg
- t3timer-dev.js
- Bender_Black.otf
- 5minutes.wav
- beep.wav
- timesup.wav
Once a new version of the code is ready for deployment, all the content files can be inlined into the SVG file by running the bundled Python script:
python inline.py t3timer-dev.svg t3timer.svg
This will create a self-contained file called t3timer.svg.
###Browser Compatibility### SVG is still an evolving format and web browsers support slightly different subsets of it. As of 2014-06-30 the situation is as follows for this project:
| Browser | Status |
|---|---|
| Google Chrome | Fully supported. |
| Apple Safari | Fully supported, but sound is a bit delayed. |
| Mozilla Firefox | Fully supported, but the animation may stutter a bit. |
| Opera | Fully supported. |
| Microsoft IE | Runs in IE 11, but is missing sound and the custom font. |
| Microsoft Edge | Fully supported. |
###Known Issues### Google Chrome seems to have a memory leak somewhere. After some hours the browser window with Tech Talk Tuesday Timer will run out of memory and crash.
###Version History### ####1.0 (2012-07-03)####
- Initial release. Yay! :-D
####1.1 (2012-07-03)####
- Flemming requested more accuracy, Rune requested faster blinking.
####1.2 (2012-09-18)####
- The guys requested sound alerts at 05:00 and when the time is up. I threw in button beeps too.
####1.3 (late 2012)####
- In Linux it's difficult to setup the ATI Remote Wonder remote control to do anything when the OK button is pushed. Now on we use D instead (for "Do it").
####1.4 (2013-06-04)####
- Added Firefox compatibility by replacing the embedded SVG font with an embedded Base64-encoded OpenType version of the same font.
- Added tags instead of procedural sound generation.
- Added Opera compatibility by doing a lot of small tweaks.
- Finally, I've added a tool for inlining the external files.
####1.5 (2014-02-18)####
- Added wallclock mode.
####1.6 (2014-06-30)####
- Various small changes.
- Documentation.
- Uploaded to GitHub.