Wide-mode (Resizing) and Progress bar enhancement

[B-E-Z]

This might be a longshot, but some if also might be (relatively) simple to implement so I'm going for. As a huge time blindness sufferer, I've taken a strong liking to visual timers and on that note, thank you for your efforts developing/maintaining good 'ol Orzeszek Timer! 🙏 It's incredibly helpful for me!

As seeing the timer while I work, keeps me aware that I'm limited in my time, and need to keep to the task at hand, I like to have the Timer active and visible. I'd like to minimize it's footprint as much as much as possible, however, to keep all my apps visible and reduce the need to constantly shift windows around and dig other windows out. I tried shrinking hourglass to a very small vertical footprint but I'm only allowed to shrink it to 150 pixels high. My Solution was to make it large enough so that the Title Bar and the top progress bar are the exact same size. (31 pixels each, see below)

I then hide the bulk of the app Behind the window that I up place at the bottom right of the desktop. When (mostly) hidden behind the lower window, I get a slimmed down Timer that stays well in my peripheral vision, has a nice wide profile for a better feel of where my time is at, and uses a minimum of my precious vertical pixels.

It appears that the window size is limited by the top-to-bottom text layout, which makes sense. Interestingly, if you hide the title bar, it doesn't seem to account for that in the scaling geometry and you are limited to roughly the same sizing constraints with additional and unnecessary white space in the window. See the side by side here:

I'd love to see the entire app in a slightly larger size and think it would be cool if it could scale to a short and wide footprint. It would be awesome if the scaling geometry accounted for the the missing title bar when that option is used, and to have it auto switch to a "Wide-mode" where, if you shrink Hourglass beyond it's standard vertical geometry, the 3 text fields line up horizontally to the left and right.

I mocked this up in Gimp and while I was at it, tinkered with fatter progress bars, to enhance the visual timer aspect of the GUI. I'm thinking you'd have a setting for "Large..." or "2x Progress bars." The image below with the wider bars shows the progress bar at 2x it's standard width when shrunk to it's smallest size. I think it looks pretty good!

Hourglass "Wide-Mode" Standard progress bars

Hourglass "Wide-Mode" 2x progress bars

Hourglass standard layout - 2x progress bars

Thanks!!

[dziemborowicz]

I like what you're suggesting here. A few people have requested support for smaller window sizes, so this or something like this is probably worth adding at some point. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to maintain the timer these days, so I can't commit to any timeline for this kind of change. :(

[i2van]

@B-E-Z I removed the window size restrictions, so now it can be minimized to the size restricted by Windows only.

• Hourglass Changes
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[B-E-Z]

@i2van - Fantastic! I'm testing now and I dig the resize ability, the bolder borders, as well as the timer orientation change by making either the height or width the longer edge. Now if I can get a signed executable so IT doesn't come knock on my door again. 😅 Cheers and Happy New Year!