Dial It Countdown

Dial It Countdown is a countdown timer for Stream Deck dials and for ordinary keys. Every dial and every key holds its own independent timer, with its own presets, its own colour theme and its own display.

The dial

Turn for seconds. Push the dial in and turn for minutes. Press the dial to start or pause the clock.

There is no mode to set and nothing left switched on when you walk away — let go and the next click is a second again. Anything longer than a few minutes is a preset, typed in the property inspector; the dial is for nudging what a preset loaded.

Turning never edits a preset. It moves the clock in front of you and leaves the configuration alone; while the two disagree the label says so, reading from 20m.

The screen, and the key

Three gestures, the same on the touchscreen and on a key:

- One tap — pause or resume.

- Two taps — reset the clock to full, stopped.

- Hold — put the clock right, then the next preset.

A hold puts a running, paused or dialled clock back to full first — only a hold with nothing left to put right moves on. Neither the reset nor the hold starts anything: putting a clock back to the top and setting it running are two decisions.

The dial's own knob holds too, and does the same thing.

A preset can be a list

Type 40, 10, 10 and the timer runs forty minutes, then ten, then ten, with no gap between them. The line under the clock counts them off as ×2/3 and says done when the list runs out. Up to twenty steps, each from one second to twenty-four hours.

Presets are typed as text, one field each, and the panel says back what it read: 40m · 10m · 10m — 1h in total. A bare number is minutes; 90s, 1h30m and 2m 30s name their own unit, and 10m x3 repeats one.

It says what it is doing

The middle of the ring carries the state, so a timer reads from across the room without being read: a play triangle running, two bars paused, a filled square done. Only an idle clock — the one state with nothing to report — shows the D|C mark instead, unless you turn it off.

Every gesture is acknowledged twice: the ring pulses, which you catch without reading, and a line names what just happened — +1m, pause, next · 20m.

While an alert is sounding the dial draws a bell, and a key says ringing — there for as long as the sound is, and gone the moment it is.

An alarm you can call off

A press silences an alert that is playing, and does nothing else — it will not start, pause or reset the clock, so you cannot quieten a sound into changing what the timer was doing. Press again for the gesture you meant, or press and hold to silence it and put the timer right in one go. Turning the dial silences it too, and still adjusts.

That is what makes a high repeat count usable: an alarm meant to outlast you walking back to the desk is no good if it cannot be called off. Every step gets its own silenceable alert.

Two displays

Pick one per dial. The ring empties as the timer runs, with the clock beside it. Or a progress bar, with the state glyph beside it. Both carry the preset and the finish time, and both take the colour theme.

Features

- Presets — 5, 20, 30 and 40 minutes out of the box. Anything from one second to twenty-four hours, up to twenty steps each.

- Seven colour themes, each keeping its states far apart in hue so the timer reads from a metre away.

- Name a timer if you want one — Tea rather than 20m. Presets carry no names: a timer's length is its own label.

- A sound when a step finishes — a bundled chime, any sound on your machine, or your own file. Up to sixty plays, at a volume you set, quieter after the third if you ask.

- Optional: a fade near the end, the finish time on screen, and an auto-reset that puts a finished timer back to the start on its own.

- Independent timers. Every dial and every key counts its own countdown.

More, with pictures: https://promptityourself.com/projects/dial-countdown/

Free, and MIT licensed. The source is public.

Dial Countdown has moved. It is now Dial It Countdown, a new plugin with its own Marketplace listing. This is the last update of Dial Countdown.

Dial Countdown keeps working, but it gets no more updates. To move:

• Install Dial It Countdown from the Marketplace.

• Place your dials and keys again, and type your presets again. Settings do not carry across.

• Remove Dial Countdown in Stream Deck's preferences.