Cube Countdown

Count down to anything in as much time as a ten second countdown.

Introduction

Cube Countdown is a fast, simple-to-use countdown timer designed with the blind in mind. If you need a clock for a game show, a timer for your exercise routine or are like me and just love countdowns, look no further than Cube Countdown.

Features

• You can either enter the hours, minutes and seconds to count down from or enter a specific time to count down to, useful for New Year's Eve, the day before someone's birthday or another special event that is happening today or at midnight tomorrow.
• You can choose to either have the program speak announcements through a screen reader or SAPI 5.
• All on-screen elements, such as buttons and text fields, are clearly labelled for screen reader users.
• Keyboard friendly navigation with tab, arrow keys etc.
• Detects if your system is in dark mode and applies a dark theme to suit.
• A customisable sound for when the countdown has expired.

Installation

From source

Cube Countdown uses UV, a fast, responsive, modern package manager for Python written in Rust.

The following instructions detail how to download and run Cube Countdown from its source code on Windows.

1. Press Windows + R, type powershell and hit enter.
2. Install UV.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

3. Use UV to install Python if it is not already installed.

uv python install

4. Clone the repository and switch to its directory.

git clone https://github.com/seediffusion/CubeCountdown.git
cd CubeCountdown

5. Install the required libraries.

uv sync

6. Run the program.

uv run python cc.py

Pre-compiled

1. Download the latest release.
2. Extract the zip file with your zip archiver of choice.
3. Navigate to the extracted program folder and run cube_countdown.exe. If file extensions don't show on your system, the filename will just be cube_countdown.

Compiling

1. Run compile.cmd to generate the Windows executable.
2. Run copysound.cmd to copy the sounds.

Usage

Standard timer

1. Run the program and enter the amount of hours in the hours field. You can either use the up and down arrow keys to adjust the value or type a number. Set the value to 0 if you just want minutes and seconds.
2. Tab to the minutes field and choose a value between 0 and 59.
3. Tab to the seconds field and choose a value between 0 and 59.
4. Press enter or click the start button to start the countdown.

Count down to an event today or tomorrow

1. Run the program and tab to the time to count down to field.
2. Enter the time in 24 hour hh:mm:ss format. For example, to count down to midnight, you'd enter 00:00:00.
3. Press start to start the countdown.

Time announcements

The following time announcements will be given during a countdown:

• X hour(s) remaining.
• 30 minutes remaining.
• 15 minutes remaining.
• 10 minutes remaining.
• 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 minute(s) remaining.
• 30 seconds remaining.
• 15 seconds remaining.
• A final 10 second countdown.
• Time's up!

Switching announcers

You can press Alt + S anywhere in the program to access the speech output settings. From there, right arrow to see the options, up and down arrow to choose between screen reader and SAPI 5, and enter to select an option. Screen reader mode uses whatever screen reader you have running, such as NVDA or Jaws, and SAPI 5 mode uses your default SAPI 5 voice in Windows.