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Why create a visual timer?

"From an early age I've been fascinated by clocks and watches. Since I've been about 5 years old I don't think I've ever been without a watch, usually a digital one, and my house is chock a block with clocks of one sort or another.

BlingClock came about because of 3 things that happened about the same time.

The first was having children! It struck me how the concept of 10 minutes to a child was so hard to grasp. I wanted a timer to show them when 10 minutes was up. I tried various timers - kitchen timers weren't much good because just showing the time in digits was a little abstract. Egg timers were the best solution I found for showing the time visually but not a very flexible approach without a whole load of them!

The second was in my own work. I'm a computer programmer by trade. When I'm working at client sites there are many distractions to deal with and it can be quite difficult to settle down and get focused on coding. The other problem with programming is time can fly away from you! If you're really concentrating on something an hour can fly by before you know it!

I was after a simple timer I could set to 15 minutes and would pop up when the time had ticked away.

Having looked around at other timers (both hardware and software) I was frustrated that I couldn't really find what I wanted. Some were quite functional but looked awful, others were quite simple but not that discreet. A few actually looked quite good but again not quite what I wanted.

So I decided I'd write a simple to use, visual timer that wasn't ugly! BlingClock was the result (a name suggested by a colleague who saw me using my early versions!). Its something I use myself every day in my working life for staying on task and trying to get things done quickly. It represents man months of development effort focusing on a simple usable timer."

Paul McGuire, founder D3BUG Software Ltd.