Everybody has had a bad experience from forgetfulness! While on the way home, you suddenly remember you should have sent a report to your manager 2 hours before. Or while you were driving to work, you can’t remember whether you switched an important appliance off or not. You turn back to home to check it and are late wherever you were going.  A  timely reminder thanks to your smartphone can prevent all this stress.

Let’s look at one or two variations on this.

Timeless:

One of the applications available on Apple’s iOS platform is Timeless, available on iPhone and iPod touch for a dollar. This is a simple and user-friendly application that allows you to set multiple timers.
Launching the application opens a clock large set at ’00:00′ (what else?) and you set the alarm at when you want to be alerted. Setting can only be in hours and minutes not in seconds.

The application can be controlled through gestures. Swiping or finger rotating the phone have different functions. It has labelled timers that can run concurrently in a tabbed, easy to access row. It can be useful for flexible project reporting, real time solutions especially with team projects. Multiple countdowns can be paused or terminated by double-tap. It has an alert mechanism that puts a notification appear on your homescreen. It is easy to use and it is possible to customize the colour and interface of the application.

Ovo Timer :

Another application for timing this time in Android is Ovo Timer, a free application. It does not have a multiple countdowns as Timeless  does and is a more basic application. For OvoTimer, being able to have a one fully featured countdown is more important than having multiple countdowns. It is easy to use however, the user can drag a finger around the screen to set the countdown timer. When the time is up an alarm will sound and you can set the sound from any of the sounds available in your smartphone, and say if you are cooking, it will let you know it’s time to check the oven. Don’t count on Ovo to remind you over a long period because it can only deal with with times 60 minutes or less. One extremely useful feature of OvoTimer is that you can rewind an old timer. You don’t need to create another timer when you want to set the same time interval. Once a timer is over, tap the circle to rewind the timer.

In the Android  interface you can see how much time is left. Unlike with Timeless you can see the both the minutes and seconds remaining. By tapping the clock’s center it is possible to pause the timer. Also, you can control the sound when the time runs out, and set whether you want the application to vibrate your phone on timer expiration or not.

Stopwatch :

This is another application, also available for $1 iTunes.  It is a very simple application alarms are set with “start, stop, reset” buttons and there are keyboard shortcuts. Sometimes the total number of seconds are required rather than minutes and seconds, and this application allows that. It continues to count the time even when interrupted by other programs. In addıtıon, when the user pits the phone in Airplane mode, it continues to work. Users can manually specify an x and y co-ordinate position on the device for the panel to be overlaid, meaning that the user has more control of how the alarm is displayed.

The Ultimate Stopwatch application on Android features has a clean and easy-to-use design, and once again it is free. After setting, user can follow how much time passed in the homescreen. But if you are in out of battery, the application itself doesn’t run in the background, but it simulates it using system events. Android users find it reliable, simple and functional.

Of course, downloading and using one of these applications is very much better than forgetting the things you must do. On the other hand, most people don’t bother as they think that there is little point in downloading such  applications when our smartphones can already do what the application does! Alarm and stopwatch features are pre-installed in the stock OS, be it iOS or Android.  All the same it is not possible to make multiple countdowns which might be useful for example, if you are a sports coach and you wish to set multiple timers making it easier for to follow  players and give them updates and instructions on their performance

For more information:

• http://www.timelessapp.com/
• http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/04/30/tnw-pick-of-the-day-timeless-is-a-beautifully-simple-timer-and-stopwatch-app-for-iphone/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/technology
• http://lifehacker.com/5928519/ovo-timer-is-a-fast-free-and-good-looking-countdown-timer-for-android