Tick! A convenient timer!

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Hi everybody !

After a year of lurking, i've published my first app !
It's called Tick! and it's a simple timer but i've worked hard on making it easy to launch.

Since there is no wheel selector on the sdk, I've developed one to set the number of minutes wanted. With three clicks, you can launch a timer to remaind you that your pastas or your eggs are ready !

Your comments are welcome !
Since I'm new on the forum, I'm currently not allowed to post external links, so if you want to try it, search for Tick! on the market or SlideMe. I will put images, links and QR-Code as soon as i will be allowed !

RabugenTom

Nice app. Any plans on releasing the source :P

Any chance for an APK for those of us without data?

Nice

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Good Work Buddy works perfectly on Xperia X10i

Thanks for the replies ! I've added the apk posted on the market.

I'm working on an improved version !

Agreed, Great work RabugenTom. Love the custom wheel selection.

Have to admit, though, I'm dying to have multiple timers. I'm not sure off the top of my head how they would fit in with your snazzy countdown timeline, but I'm sure it could be done.

+1 for release of the source

Love the app... Mightve been nice if it worked with 30sec increments as well but that might just be me, and there are other more robust timer apps for when you need that i guess.

One thing I noticed though... If the app is open and showing on the screen (IE - not in the background while working on something else or on one of the home screens), Tapping the app notification (in the notifications pane) will "reopen" the apps interface, and this can be done multiple times.
Basically you end up with multiple instances of the same timer... So if youre looking to go back to whatever was open before - home screen or other - by pressing the back button, youll just close the last instance you "opened" via the notification, taking you back to the previous instance of that same timer, and so on until you reach the first one that was opened when you started the app.
It doesnt seem to affect the functionality of the app in any way that ive seen, but it is rather odd.
Sort of like tapping the notification calls on the wrong "show" function, opening a new window rather than un-hiding the original.

Thanks for the feedbacks !
I'm working on an improved version with pause mode, multiple timers and 30s increments. I will maybe release the source later, after a lot of cleaning !

For the notifications, it's the behavior of android which works by intents. Theses are sort of messages send to applications. Intents depends on something they call Context. This is very powerful since you can launch (or do whatever you want to) an application in different ways, and the behavior of the application can depend on the intent. For example, when you launch an application from the launcher on the home screen, you actually send an intent to the application.

In the Tick! case, when you click on the notification, you send an intent to bring back to foreground (if hidden) or relaunch (if closed) the application GUI (which is different from the counting "engine" which is a background process called Service). The intent sent from the notification is different from the one you used to launch it, thats why it relaunch the GUI because the system thinks it is a different context (which is the case).

You can try it : launch from the launcher, launch a timer, go back to the home screen. Now, the GUI is no more in foreground. If you open the notification bar an click on the notification it will relaunch the GUI as expected, and if you continue to click on it again, it will do nothing (as expected). That's because the second time you launched the app, you did it by sending an intent from the notificiation bar, which is different from the one from the launcher.

Now, i don't find this behavior very annoying, and I don't want to write 100 lines of code to handle differents cases! A trivial solution may exist, but I'm too novice with Android to look at it. If someone knows this easy solution, it will be a pleasure to implement it !

Very nice timer. However I have found two problems:

1. When selecting the notification tone, "Default" plays my ringtone when previewing, but when used for real it plays the default notification sound instead.

2. I used Tick for a five minute countdown several hours ago, and afterwards I exited the program and cleared the notification, but it still prevented my phone from sleeping all these hours, draining the battery severely. I had to use a process killer to get my phone to sleep.

Do you really need to keep the phone from sleeping, even during the countdown? A timer is just an alarm with a countdown, and alarms work even when the phone is sleeping. You just have to update the progress every time the phone wakes up. Right?

Hi,

1-I will look on the notification problem. It is quite strange since it always worked for me. Note that the parameter are set for the notification at the launch of the counter. Every change you make will affect only new countdowns. When you exit the app, it always save the last parameters, even made during a countdown, and restore them at a relaunch. So it is strange, and since i've improved again the counting engine, I hope this will be solved in the coming release.

2-You're right, I've found conditions when the wake-lock is not released at the end of the countdown. It's set now. However, the wake-lock requested is partial and does only concern the CPU, not the screen. I've tested again your version on my unplugged G2 and it behave just well.

The CPU is required to fire an alarm even in sleep mode. Thats because i don't use the alarm service of the device which only check every new minute if there is something to do.

And when it's in sleep mode, only a tiny service is counting. The GUI is stopped and it's memory given back.


May I ask what model of phone you use?