Resizable window about timer-app

[pjpjq]

sometimes too big when I work with other windows of full screen size, while I still want the timer window float on top

[luckman212]

Sometimes I wish I could stretch the window very large so I can view it from across the room. So I guess there are 2 use cases here!🙂

[karbassi]

@wendingp Can you explain a little more. Is the window too small or too big? What's your use case?

[karbassi]

Thanks @wendingp and @luckman212 for the use cases. We'll take a look.

[karbassi]

@robinstewart Want to take a stab at this? ❤️

[robinstewart]

@karbassi Thanks for asking, but no I've run out of time for working on this for now. However I have some thoughts on design issues, which I'll describe here.

Part of what's great about this app is that it was carefully designed for its current size. I think smaller and larger variants would need different designs to best serve those use cases. Specifically, for the "small" use case, you'd want a design that optimizes for space saving. For the "large" use case, you'd want a design that optimizes for readability at a distance.

There are also usability issues with simple scaling of the UI. The main control triangle needs to be big enough to easily grab with the mouse, so that doesn't scale down well. Dragging the control triangle all the way around the circle becomes clumsy at large sizes, so that doesn't scale up well.

Overall it seems to me that there is a relatively small range of sizes for which the current design works well, and I'm not sure if anything in that range really serves the use cases described above.

An alternate solution would be to provide several different timer designs to choose from, including one optimized for space saving and one optimized for readability. This would be an option you could choose for each timer — similar to choosing between alarm sounds.

This would also significantly expand the scope of the app to be able to show any timer UI implemented by the community. I suppose that's a reasonable model for an open source app, opening the door for other contributions and use cases while keeping the charm and utility of the original design.

All that being said, if anyone wants to take a crack at making a scalable version of the current design, I certainly won't stop you!

[arigit]

+1 on this. I use a 4K external monitor and the size of the timer is really tiny and hard to see.
Still useful though but a simple resizing/scaling would be super nice. Ideally the app would remember the last size setting and it would default to it on the next launch