Article
Why you wind Untimer
There is no start button. You press and hold the glass for two and a half seconds, and letting go is what starts the session. Here is why it works that way.
Hello Untimer. Try something before you read on. Open the app, or use the glass on the front page of this site, and click it once. Nothing happens. Now press it and hold.
After a fifth of a second the spring engages. For the next two and a half seconds the glass pushes back against you. A ratchet clicks, the clicks spread out as the spring fills, and the pitch drops, the way a real mechanism gets heavier the further you wind it. At the stop there is a catch. Let go now and the session begins with a soft settle.
If you let go before the stop, the glass unwinds and nothing starts. The screen says so, and it is fine.
That is how a session begins in Untimer, and it is the only way one begins.
A click costs nothing
Most timers have a start button, and a start button is a fine thing on a kitchen wall. The trouble with it for focused work is that pressing it costs nothing, so it means nothing. You can press it while you are still deciding, press it absently, press it and wander off. The timer starts and you have not.
Winding costs something. It is a small thing, two and a half seconds of attention, but you have to give it. By the time you let go, you have already decided to begin.
What winding is
Winding is a press and a hold. The feel of it comes from four numbers, and they are the same on every screen and will be the same on every device.
- Two hundred milliseconds before the spring engages, so a stray press does nothing.
- Two and a half seconds to wind fully. We tried a second and a half first, and it was over before you noticed you had done anything.
- A resistance curve, so the same steady press moves the spring less the further it is wound. The ratchet has twenty four teeth spaced evenly along the spring, which is why the clicks spread out on their own as you go.
- A catch at the stop, and a settle when you let go.
The keyboard works the same way: hold Enter or Space, and release at the stop. If your system asks for less motion, nothing animates and nothing sounds, and you still hold it all the way.
What winding does not do
It does not choose how long the session is. Early versions of the glass let the wind pick the length, and that turned the wind into a control. You watched the number instead of feeling the spring. A session is twenty five minutes every time, and the wind has nothing to say about it.
There is also no shortcut beside it. We built one for a day, a tap to start next to the glass for people in a hurry, and it taught us something. Nobody winds when a shortcut sits next to the glass. The wind only means something because it is the only door.
Every other control in Untimer is an ordinary button. Noticing an interruption, resetting, stopping, taking a break. You never wind for a break. Rest is something you take, and you should not have to earn it.
Why it is there
Winding is craft. No study compares a mechanical timer with a digital one on how well people work, and we make no claims about that. The founder has used a timer every working day for years, and this is the beginning he wanted: a door you push through, with a little weight to it. A product for people who find beginning hard should make the beginning feel like one.
The one cost, and what we did about it
A glass that ignores clicks has a cost, and we would rather say it than hide it. Someone who uses switch access, voice control, or a screen reader in browse mode cannot hold. For them the ritual is a locked door.
The answer is a separate action, out of sight until it is focused, labelled plainly: wind the glass for me. It performs the same wind, with the same two and a half seconds and the same ratchet. The only thing it does for the person is hold. A session starts no faster by it.
How it sounds
Every sound in Untimer is synthesised. There are no audio files, so there is nothing to download and nothing that can drift out of step with the screen. The ratchet you hear is a square wave through a low pass filter, twenty four times, each click pitched by how far the spring is wound. The catch is a short falling tone. The settle is a low, warm note, and it is the last thing you hear before twenty five minutes of quiet.
Letting go early makes no sound at all. It is not a mistake, and there is no failure sound anywhere in Untimer.
If you want it quiet, the switch is in the rail, in plain sight, because the moment you want it is usually the moment someone walks into the room.