Intruducing Teatime

Since Unity does not support panel-applets any more, I also could not use timer-applet, which I used as an egg-timer. After several 30min “brewed” teas, I finally decided that I needed an replacement. So I started writing Tea Time.

Tea Time: Main Window

Instead of just porting timer-applet to the indicators API, I wrote Tea Time as an ordinary program and use the features of Unity instead, so I could take at the new APIs along the way.

Besides I think that porting every possible applet from gnome2 to the indicators API is not the way to go. The top-right of my screen is pretty cramped again already and one really does not need to see the timer information all the time. I hope Unity will get a Dashboard similar to the one in OSX soon, as this is really the place where most of the applets belong. But for the time being I used the Unity launcher.

When a timer is running, a progress bar is displayed

So when you click on Start Timer Tea Time minimises to the launcher instead of the notification area and starts displaying a progress bar. I also added the time elapsed since the timer finished to the notification bubble.

The notification also tells you how long the tea has already waited for you

So in case you miss the first notification(did not look at the PC for instance), you now instantly see whether you can still drink your tea or whether you can instantly pour it away.

The nicest thing is that all of this fits into just about 250 lines of python. 🙂

44 thoughts on “Intruducing Teatime”

  1. What a nice app! I suggest to use Tea Time launcher’s quicklist to quickly select from preconfigured presets. Also the possibility to play a sound when time’s up would be nice.

  2. I love it. However for me it looks terrible, not at all like in the screenshot. Complains about canberra-gtk-module, but that’s already installed. Any idea?

    1. it using GTK3 on your system. You could unintstall “gir1.2-gtk-3.0” – nothing should depent on that. Meanwhile I can look into how to force a specific GTK version..

  3. Thank you a lot! Nice little thing. I really need something like that for not to forget the pasta. 😉 Any plans to add a standard (some old steam engine whistle 🙂 )or even customizable sound when a countdown is finished?
    These are the small things why I love my Ubuntu.

  4. It is worth noting that the package name is “teatime-unity” as apt installing “teatime” on Natty will pull natty/universe teatime 2.8.0. which is a Gnome 2 panel applet.

  5. Hello, I installed teatime from your PPA, but I can’t find it in the Applications dash. There’s no app called teatime. How do I find that?

    1. the package is called teatime-unity. you probably installed teatime – which is an old gnome2 applet.

  6. It’s nice, thanks! But in my unity there is neither any icon nor a progress bar… am I doing something wrong or might this be a bug?

    1. first you have to be running unity. it does not work with the classical gnome session. But then it should be available in the applications menu. The progress bar only appears once you start a timer.

    1. first you have to be running unity. it does not work with the classical gnome session. But then it should be available in the applications menu.

  7. How this should work? I doubleclick on the ”New entry’ row and nothing is happening. The ‘Start Timer’ button is disabled.
    Ubunu 11.10

  8. There is an issue with Tea Timer under Gnome 3 Classic. The application doesn’t recognize a window pop-up when a time period has expired and continues to alarm every N seconds until you explicitly maximize its window.

  9. Any way to view the time remaining by hovering over the launcher icon? Perhaps display it in a notification bubble would be great.

  10. In this blog post you show it running from the Panel. How do I get it into the panel? It only runs in Launcher on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

  11. Is there a way to customiz app, like sounds when the timer is off, or repetiting a reminder in a loop for 8 hrs a day ?

  12. Would like to see multiple timers set for a single tea – eg time to dunk, time to remove, time to start drinking. So phases basically…

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