Sterling Rose Design Blog

I’ve been using timeboxing for a little over three weeks now, off and on, and I continue to find it a very useful technique for my own working environment.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone at Macmation about their product, TimeBoxed.

TimeBoxed was designed to be extremely simple to use.
Each of its features has been carefully designed and configured to adhere to the core mission of this application.
In fact, many features were discarded because they just couldn’t live up to our stringent mission requirements.
The result is an application that does exactly what you need, the way you need it.

The install went off without a hitch and took about 30 seconds after the download.



TimeBoxed acts as a tiny little window with a status bar and a title bar. The title bar shows the total time you set, the status bar gradually fills in and changes from green to red as the time period draws to a close.



Once time has elapsed, you are alerted in any of several ways:

• Growl notification
• Voice-synthesized message
• Bouncing dock icon
• Pulsing status bar window
• Sound (bell, chime, etc.)

Being a fan of the show Top Chef, I naturally set my voice message to “Knives down, hands up!” TimeBoxed has all kinds of synthesized voices you can choose from – anything from the cheerful “Princess” to the really creepy “Whisper.” I settled on the “Alex” voice which, to my ear, sounds the most realistic.



I worried that having the status bar window always on top of the screen would distract me from writing code, so I was very glad to see that there are options for both opacity and window level, but it ended up not being a problem. I moved the status bar window to the lower-left corner of my screen, and it was totally unobtrusive there.

My one criticism of the application is that you get no numeric indication of how much time has elapsed. It’s too soon to know yet whether this is a help or a hindrance for the way I timebox, but it would be nice to have the option.

Overall, I like the application and its voice-synthesis feature will likely make it my preferred timer when I don’t need to see the numeric countdown.

Download Free Trial of TimeBoxed