Countdown has finally been upgraded. It’s now up to v4.0 and features a completely new user interface. It has most of the features of v3.0 but, importantly, works with OS X 10.5+ (only). The Countdown page has also been updated and offers downloads for all versions of OS X except for 10.0.

Countdown is kind of my baby. It was my first freeware application. It was easily my most popular application for a long time. It was a labor of love. Quite possibly the smallest application that could possibly do what I needed it to do. I wrote it specifically for me but a lot of people have used it.

I’ve heard from people who use it pretty much as I do, to keep from burning things in the oven while they waste time on the computer. I’ve had emails from people saying that they use it on their boats to mark buoys and from people who time sessions. Countdown is used in many, many different ways. I’m always happy to hear how people use it.

Unfortunately, it’s been in a limbo for a long time. I don’t recall if version 3.0 ever came out. There was the original release that saw a few bug fixes and updates. Then there was a 2.0 line in which I tried something completely different. Rather than have 2.x, I was simply going to have different releases. It started with r1 and got up to r3, I think. My idea was that I was just going to work on Countdown iteratively. That idea didn’t last.

When OS X 10.5 came out, Countdown simply wouldn’t launch. It’d crash part way through the startup. I have no idea why and never could diagnose it. I immediately started working on a whole new Countdown. It was lavish with lots of eye candy and animation and whatnot. It kept track of multiple timers and did I mention the eye candy? It looked great and I used it frequently but it never really got up to speed with all of Countdown’s features. It was also a bit unwieldy. Still, I thought if I just kept working on it, I’d bring it forward.

Well, this weekend I had enough. I started from scratch. Using BWToolkit to provide most of my UI needs, I tossed it together in a couple of days. Granted, most of the heavy lifting was taken from old versions of Countdown. I didn’t need to write another formatter for the time left and I brought over nearly all of the notification code (flashing screen, bouncing icon in Dock, playing a sound, etc.).

I also made the decision to make the application document-based. This was an idea that I had for some intermediate version of Countdown that I used but never finished. However, that version still had a table view displaying all of the running timers. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that users probably don’t have 10 or more timers going at once. It was rather ridiculous to bring out that tired table view every time. If I’m going document-based, let the time count down in the documents. If you like this approach, please email me and let me know. If you don’t, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

In the end, this version of Countdown has a lot less code than previous versions but has been nearly completely redone. Sure, some of the code survived from earlier versions, but the basic structure of the application in addition to the internal timer has been completely re-written. And it’s been done over a weekend.

Sure, there isn’t anything new compared to older versions. No new features and even a feature or two dropped. But it shows that I’m still committed. Countdown is still my baby. Help it grow and give me feedback. What do you want? What do you miss? What don’t you like in the new version? Let me know and I’ll spend a bit more time on Countdown in the near future.

My next project will be finishing Paperclip 2.0. Yes, it’s coming and you will be able to attach multiple notes to one document.