Final Countdown 1.7

Written by Marco Coïsson
Versione italiana
Please note that this application is no longer supported, because of my limited spare time. I cannot guarantee neither future development nor bug fixes. Sorry.

What is it?

Final Countdown is a cocoa application that gives you the possibility to start as many timers as you like. A timer can be a standard countdown for a user-defined number of days-hours-minutes-seconds or a countdown to a user-defined date (day-month-year and hour-minutes-seconds). When the timer fires, you can choose to be notified by a beep or an alert sheet, to launch an app or a script or to shut down your computer.

Set up a timer

To create a new timer, select "New Timer" from the "File" menu, or press command-N. A new timer window should automatically appear on screen when you launch the application. Each timer is an independent document, that you can save to disk. However, even if you don't want to save the file to disk, you can assign the timer a name typing it in the appropriate text field. This lets you identify the timer any time.

If you are running a conventional countdown, you can set days-hours-minutes-seconds.

The "Repeat" checkbox continually repeats the countdown: each time it fires, it automatically starts over again. You can choose to delay the repetition of the timer by a certain amount of seconds by writing a number greater than zero in the "Delay" text field.

If you are running a "Date" countdown, you can set day-month-year and hour-minutes-seconds; at that date, the countdown will fire.

The "Now" button lets you set all these parameters to their current values.

Independently on which kind of timer you choose, three buttons called "Start", "Stop" and "Pause" let you control the timer execution. The "Pause" button is not available for "Date" timers, while for conventional countdowns its name changes to "Resume" when it's pressed. In this way, a visual feedback of the state of the timer (paused or running) is available at any time.

Some controls into the "Action" box let you choose what to do when a timer fires. A sound will always be played; you can choose what sound to play from the appropiate pop-up menu, that lists all the sound files (.aiff files) located into the following folders on your hard disk:
/System/Library/Sounds/
/Library/Sounds/
~/Library/Sounds/

Besides the playing of a sound, you can choose an additional action to be executed when a timer fires. Available options are:


Since each timer needs its own window, and each window occupies precious screen real estate, you can choose to automatically hide timer windows when FinalCountdown is in background. This frees you from the need to minimize windows in the dock, crowding it with icons. A list of all the active timers, with the three buttons essential to control them, is always available in the much smaller "Timers" list window:

The list of the active timers and their time to go, without any possiblity to control them, is also available in the dock menu attached to FinalCountdown icon and in the optional menu located in the SystemStatusBar (the right-most portion of the menu bar).
"Start on open", if checked, gives you a shortcut: the timer automatically starts when opened from file, without the need to push the "Start" button. Useful if, for example, you put your timer's document into the login items (System Preferences, Login panel): the document will be opened and the timer will be started without any additional participation form your part.
"Show time to go in idependent window", if checked, lets you put a window on screen having for title the name you gave to the timer and for content the remaining time, written with the font and colour you most like:

If you resize the window, the font size is rescaled and the window is more or less filled in height by the remaining time. At the moment, FinalCountdown cannot guarantee that the window is filled by the remaining time also for all its width. However, a proper selection of font and colour should let you see the remaining time even if you are relatively far away from the screen (e.g. on the other side of the room).

Preferences

Some of the choices described earlier can be set up by default for each new timer you create. Choose "Preferences" in the "FinalCountdown" menu and this window will appear on screen:

Here you can choose to show the menu in the SystemStatusBar, to automatically set the checkbox to hide timer windows when FinalCountdown is in background, to automatically set the checkbox to start a timer when opened from file. You can also choose the default font and colour for the remaining time displayed in independent windows.

Known bugs and issues

Ideas

First of all, I would like to thank all those users that helped to add features and fix bugs to FinalCountdown with their feedback and bug reports. All those people that would like to see a certain feature implemented in a next release of FinalCountdown are strongly encouraged to contact me. These are the ideas I'm working on and that could be implemented in future releases of FinalCountdown (as usual, I cannot give a precise scheduling):

Download

You can download the application as a zipped file.

Licensing

This software is freeware: use it as much as you like and distribute it freely; just keep included documentation attached to the application.

That horrible icon's history

I regret to say that my graphic skills are somewhere near zero. So I always skipped the task to design a decent icon for FinalCountdown... until version 1.6! The great idea was to take a picture of the eggtimer I have in my kitchen and convert it into FinalCountdown's icon. That's too bad, I know, but at least it's an icon!

Get some other MacOSX software by Marco Coïsson

Visit my MacOS X software page to get other nice MacOS X software.

Thank you and enjoy Final Countdown 1.7

Version history