After a significant amount of time and effort and the gracious help of several contributors, I’m proud to officially announce tomatoi.st.
tomatoi.st is a simple timer application that helps you implement the Pomodoro Technique. You should totally use it.
While pairing with Corey Grusden a few months ago, we decided to experiment with the Pomodoro Technique. We immediately found that it helped improve our productivity and fight off project fatigue. Plus it gave Corey some officially sanctioned time in which to deal with his digital logorrhea (SMS much?). Needless to say, we were hooked!
The immediate hurdle was that the software available for doing the timing was lackluster (fwiw, decent software has since been developed). In light of this, we spent the first few days working with a simple sleep 1500 &&
growlnotify type solutioni which was inelegant at best. More importantly, it was missing an utterly essential piece of functionality: the ability to start a timer at my desk, go to the john, and check up on the time left in a break whilst on the throne!
And so, in pursuit of this lofty goal, a tomato was born.
tomatoi.st does very little, but we like to think it does it very well. ahem.
It is suggested that you do 4 sets of Pomodoros. The first three are followed by a short break, the last by a long one. tomatoi.st makes the assumption that you’ll be doing them in that order and handily suggests the next timer you should do by highlighting it’s button in green when the previous timer expires. Your current timer is highlighted in yellow while it’s underway and then red once it’s expired. Your timer history is tracked just below the big ticker.
Timers out of sync with reality (say, after a long lunch)? Click the “Reset” button to start fresh.
Want to come back to this set of timers tomorrow? Customize the name of the timer and then “rename” it so it’s easy to remember.
It is not intended to be a full implementation of the Pomodoro Technique. Notably absent are things like task planning and daily review.
Coming up promptly is integration with Fluid’s javascript API to provide neat things like Growl integration.
Want to help shape the face of what tomatoi.st will become? There are a number of ways you can help do so:
A number of people have contributed to making this application what it is and I’d like take a second to thank them all.