I am pleased to announce the release of Dinner Timer Lite and the DinnerTimer.com web site.
Dinner Timer Lite can be downloaded, for free from DinnerTimer.com.
Dinner Timer Lite is as the name implies a timer to help with the timing of cooking, although it doesnt have to stop there, it can be used for any application that requires a count down timer.
Dinner Timer Lite is the first of a few Dinner Timer applications to come from Analysis UK, however these are still in development and there are more features to be added to Dinner Timer Lite as well so please keep an eye out on DinnerTimer.com
Dinner Timer Lite features a flexible notifiers architecture, it currently ships with bubble and sound notifiers so you can get a pop up bubble from the system tray or play built in, or custom sounds on specific events.
A number of different events are supported when running the application, these naturally include start and end events but also a timer end close event, two timer over run events which can be configured to suite your own style of cooking.
A novel feature is the over run timer, when the time is complete the timer keeps running, telling you exactly how long over the completion time you have gone, no need to scramble around resetting the timer just to get an extra minute for the peas.
The transparency/opacity settings of Dinner Timer Lite can be used to allow the timer to be visible as well as what ever (TV on the PC?) happens to be underneath it, the transparency changes with the events of the timer, so when your dinner is cooked the timer is fully visible and when its not running it can be practically invisible.
You may well be asking why you need a PC based timer when you have a stand alone one. I have two stand alone timers and I still use Dinner Timer Lite regularly. Often I return to my PC to carry on working on the various projects and realise that I have not set the timer, Dinner Timer Lite is only a click away at this time and becomes very useful, especially as it would typically be 5-10 minutes before I got around to returning to the kitchen to set the timer and I would end up burning the dinner.
I wrote Dinner Timer Lite to solve the problems of me returning to the PC to carry on working and forgetting to start a timer, so I could easily see how the time was going and because I didnt find the two normal timers I had to be particularly use friendly.
Even if you are using a normal timer, Dinner Timer Lite can still be very useful, its easy to see how long remains, or if you want to put something extra on a set time after you started dinner you can put Dinner Timer Lite into elapsed time mode.
Maybe like me, youve set the timer for your Pizza, returned to the PC to get a little bit of work done but you know full well you want to be back for the Pizza early, just start the timer, it will warn you just before the timer is complete (1 minute by default), you can also keep an eye on the time remaining with out having to be in the kitchen to watch the timer.
This is the first release of Dinner Timer Lite and I am keen to get feedback, so please use the support page or comments here to let me know what you think and what extras you think a timer should provide. I already have a big list of bits to add to the full Dinner Timer and Dinner Timer Lite.