Pomodoro Timer/ Quick timer on wall/Main Page

[Gensokian]

Being able to set a timer (or multiple) from the Main page (or the Wall-Home page) would be awesome. Even further, if there is some sort of notification that gets sent, the timers would notify the user on any other devices.

[ulsklyc]

Thanks - and this is a better fit for the wall page than it might look, because the wall is exactly the screen where a running timer is worth glancing at.

Two things already exist that sound related but are not what you are asking for. Countdowns (#647, v2.18.0) count down to a dated event or task, in days; they answer "how long until the holiday", not "ring in 25 minutes". And reminders fire relative to an appointment. A kitchen or Pomodoro timer is a different object: it has no date, it is started by hand, and it is over in minutes.

The interesting half of your request is the second one, and it is also the hard one. Notifying you on your other devices means the timer cannot live in the browser tab that started it - a phone locks its screen and suspends the page, so a purely client-side timer stops being trustworthy the moment you put the device down. That points at the server, and there the granularity is the problem: the push scheduler runs once a minute (setInterval(run, 60_000)), which is right for "your appointment starts in 15 minutes" and wrong for a timer, where being up to 59 seconds late is the whole failure. So this needs either its own scheduling path or an accepted rounding to the minute, and that is a decision about what the feature promises, not an implementation detail.

The local-only version - a timer on the wall and the overview, running in the page, no cross-device notification - is much smaller and would already cover the "timer on the wall" part of your title. I would rather ship that first than promise the synchronised version.

Leaving this open. Which of the two matters more to you: the timer being visible on the wall, or the notification reaching your phone?

[Gensokian]

Honestly just the timer on the wall, notification/reminder is just the cherry on top ^^

[ulsklyc]

Shipped in v2.60.0, @Gensokian - partly, and it is worth saying which part.

The wall display has a kitchen timer: three, five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes, remaining time in figures you can read across the room, and a chime at the end. It runs on the tablet itself, so it needs no connection to anything and keeps running while the rest of the page reloads. The photo screensaver stays out of the way while a timer is counting.

What is not in there is the notification to your other devices. That was the expensive half of the request: it would need the timer to live on the server rather than on the tablet, with push delivery and its own state to keep in sync. The device-local version is useful on its own for the case the wall page is actually used for, so it went in first. If the cross-device part is what you actually wanted, say so and it can be looked at separately - it is a different feature, not a missing detail of this one.