Sometimes things don’t have to be very complex to have an impact. In fact, Apple’s entire design esthetic focuses on the “less is more” philosophy, and the associated principles clearly have an influence on many iOS and OS X developers. Case in point: One of the coolest Mac apps I’ve seen in a long time is also one of the simplest Mac apps I’ve seen in a long time.
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You’ll only need to use Gestimer for a single second to see how cool its design is. In fact, you don’t even have to use it at all — just watch this video:
Gestimer App
Gestimer is a beautiful Mac menu bar app for those little reminders during the day. Simply drag the Gestimer menu bar icon onto the screen to create your reminder. Drag & drop from the menu bar to create short-term reminders. Quickly add descriptions to your reminders. Gestimer will also display a pop-up box which tells you the length of the timer, when it will end and an animated analog clock as you drag the icon. Once you’ve dragged the icon to the time that you needed, you can optionally enter a description for the timer. I wish I needed to set a lot timers on my Mac, because the user interaction idea.
Gestimer is a ridiculously simple reminders app for Mac computers that lives in the menu bar at the top of your display, so it’s always accessible. To set a new reminder, you simply click and hold on the app’s menu bar icon, and then drag it down toward the center of your screen.
A very cool animation makes it look like you’re drawing a shade, and the further you pull the icon, the further in the future your reminder will be set.
Gestimer is available for $2.99 in the Mac App Store.
At a glance
Cons
Our Verdict
The best solutions are often the simplest. Time after time, Apple has unveiled revolutionary new input methods that seem obvious in retrospect but are ingenious in their simplicity; things like the mouse, the click wheel, and multitouch are so deceptively simple they have instantly changed the way we approach the respective interfaces they control, bringing faster and more efficient interactions with the various elements on the screen.
Gestimer
That’s precisely why menu bar apps are my favorite kind of utility. Over the years I’ve probably used hundreds of them, and as you can see in the screenshots below, there are no less than a dozen of them at the top of my screen at any given time (not counting the ones Apple lets me put there). Their beauty lies in their innate simplicity, putting important bits of information and controls in my line of sight and cutting down on the time I need to spend navigating complex interfaces.
Gestimer (Mac App Store link) took the very presumptions I had about menu bar apps and turned them on their head. With the soul of an iOS app and the heart of an applet, the basic timer utility doesn’t just boil down a series of steps into a single click; it extracts the very essence of simplicity in such a way that will change the way you approach your Mac’s menu bar.
When you click the Gestimer icon for the first time, nothing about it prepares you for how remarkable it is. A small screen will tell you that there are no reminders set and you’ll see a settings icon and a plus symbol that lets you to start a new timer. But selecting it won’t open a dial or a slider to adjust the duration; instead you’ll see an animated tutorial of how to properly use Gestimer. And that’s when your mind will be blown.
To set a timer, you drag the icon like you would a pullstring to raise a window shade. The longer you drag it the more time you’ll get for your reminder, and letting go at the desired interval starts the countdown. You can set as many concurrent timers as you’d like (and trust me, you’ll use any excuse to do so), each of them can be named to easily differentiate between them.
And that’s pretty much all it does. You can’t edit a timer after it’s been created or pause it once it starts, and the menu bar icon doesn’t differentiate between a running timer and an idle one. And while it saves an archive of completed timers, you can’t restart one or make it recurring.
Gestimer Mac
But Gestimer’s simple sophistication is more than enough to make up for its utter lack of features. I’ve never used a menu bar app that let me interact with it in such a direct way, but it feels like one those simple solutions that seems so obvious I can’t believe no one’s ever thought of it before.