Sharpening the blade, part MCMXVII: Nine Amazing Hours.

[elfs]

I resolved, earlier this year, to start finishing some of my projects.  That hasn’t gone too well– the day jobbe appears to have chewed up most of my time.  But after my Palm V died, I no longer had a chiming program to help me get into the rhythm of the day.  I’ve since replaced it on my Palm T|X, but I’ve wanted something that I could feed through my headphones, rather than rely on the Palm, which chimes loud enough the whole house or office can hear it.

So, my first foray into times and chimes is done.  I used some free bamboo photoshop brushes, and jQuery, but the HTML, CSS, graphics, layout and so forth is all mine.  The script is 100% HTML5, there’s a lot of CSS3, and it uses HTML5 native audio, so this thing doesn’t work at all on IE (unless you’re running IE9; I don’t know what the capabilities of IE9 are yet).  Basically it works on latest & greatest: Chrome, Safari 3, Firefox 3.6 (maybe 3.5?) and so forth.  The whole project took approximately 10 hours of development time.

Nine Amazing Hours

Critiques, comments, suggestions are all welcome.  The functionality is what I want it to be; if you want a full-fledged meditation timer well, maybe I’ll do that next.

And one beg: The idea behind these projects is to learn how to, as my design teachers put it, “design, develop, market and maintain a project.”  I have no idea how to market something like this.  How would I go about telling people about it?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Comments

[datapacrat.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I couldn't tell you anything about marketing... only that I, too, have found use for such a chimer, though since most of my time is spent with a Windows laptop, I'm able to use a small freeware taskbar program, Chimer from Blaiz Enterprises, available at http://www.brothersoft.com/blaiz-enterprises---chimer-25528.html among other places.

I'm afraid that, since my daily schedule only rarely intersects '8am through 5pm', then the current version of "9 Amazing Hours" page is of little-to-no use to me. If there were an option to, say, set 9AH to chime every half-hour in accordance with the Royal British Navy bells system, and not just 8am to 5pm, then 9AH would exceed Blaiz's functionality for me.


The timing is wrong for me right now - is there a way to adapt 9AH to work on an iPhone/iPod Touch? (There does exist an Apple appstore app, "Ships Bells", which claims similar functionality, but it's not free, and I'm unable to tell whether it would work in the background while the device is doing something else.)


The only marketing-related idea that occurs to me is that if you can get mentioned on at least one of the trifecta of the geek news sites - Boing Boing, SlashDot, and MetaFilter - then you'll be golden; but I don't believe that 9AH's current functionality is quite enough to catch any of their editors' eyes, yet.

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

Off topic, but since you're interested in sous-vide cooking:

http://scientopia.org/blogs/everydaybiology/2010/08/12/cooking-in-a-sauna/