Timer 2.0.1 If the
iPhone Clock app's single timer is too limited for you, Timer is an elegant,
easy-to-use app that lets you configure and customize multiple timers, quickly
accessing any of them with a tap.
The iPhone’s stock Clock app is
versatile, offering instances of a world clock, an alarm clock, a stopwatch,
and a single timer. Unfortunately, each of those features is pretty basic: For
example, the timer mode offers just a single timer.
I don’t know about you, but I often
need more than one timer—when I’m cooking, for instance, I need to keep track
of multiple dishes, each with its own schedule. Similarly, while I occasionally
need a timer with an arbitrary length, more often than not I’m tracking the
time of a specific task that I perform regularly: my favorite frozen food in
the oven, laundry cycles, intervals at the gym. The Clock app requires me to
reconfigure its single timer for each task.
Timer gives you 15 timers on an iPhone 5.
If, like me, you find the Clock
timer to be too limiting, you’ll want to check out App Cubby’s free Timer
(App Store link). This easy-to-use app offers a
slew of configurable timers (15 on an iPhone 5 or fifth-generation iPod touch,
12 on older devices) so you always have the right timer for a particular
activity—steeping tea, cooking pizza, working out, you name it—at your fingertips.
For each timer, you can choose
either a specific length of time or opt to be prompted for the duration on the
fly—on my iPhone, I’ve got nine timers pre-configured, with the remaining six
open. Tap any pre-configured timer to start it; tap any ad-hoc timer to be
prompted for the time (setting the time automatically starts the timer).
Tap and hold any
timer—pre-configured or open—and you can choose that timer’s alert sound; you
can also choose a button color, as well as a text or graphic label. These
options make it easy to quickly find the right timer—for example, my frozen
pizza timer displays a slice of pizza on its button. You can also give the
entire app an alternate skin if you’re not a fan of the stock look. (Though
Timer is free, you can purchase, for $1 or $2, UI bundles of themes, sounds,
and graphics to further customize the app and timers. If you’re crazy for these
add-ons, $10 gets you everything currently available, as well as all future
add-ons.)
While a timer is running, its button
“glows” and you see, on the button itself, the timer counting down. You can
have as many timers running concurrently as you want, making Timer perfect for
cooking. When one finishes, you hear whatever alert sound you’ve configured for
that timer; you also see an onscreen alert, and the timer’s button flashes
until you tap the button to stop it.
Timer lets you pre-configure the time, label, color, and
alert sound for each alarm.
In a clever “Why don’t they all do
this?” touch, Timer’s timers don’t stop at zero. Rather, once a timer reaches
zero, it rolls right on through and counts up, so if you missed the
alert, you know exactly how long ago the timer ended. My only complaint here is
that I wish Timer added a minus (-) sign when counting up to make it even
clearer that what you’re seeing is “stoppage time.”
One other minor complaint is that
when an alarm ends, its alert sound plays only once. Granted, the timer’s
button continues to flash and, as I noted, the timer counts up, so it’s easy
enough to figure out that a timer is done, but if I set my phone down on the
kitchen counter and go to the next room, I occasionally miss a timer alert. I’m
guessing that App Cubby chose this approach because, with the capability to
have up to 15 timers, you could end up with multiple alerts playing over each
other, with no way to tell which sound goes with which timer. Still, I wish the
timer configuration screen included an option to repeat the alert sound until
you stopped the timer.
Really, my biggest complaint—which
is more compliment than criticism—is that I wish there was an iPad version of
Timer so that I could use the app on even more of my devices. It’s a flexible
and easy-to-use way to track your timed tasks.
At
a Glance
If the iPhone Clock app's single
timer is too limited for you, Timer is an elegant, easy-to-use app that lets
you configure and customize multiple timers, quickly accessing any of them with
a tap.
