Ubuntu Clock App

Doubts with Clock App features and future planning

Asked by Dan González

I intended to report a bug, just to be wish listed, because now that we have a stopwatch feature, perhaps its time to consider a countdown timer.

As I fill the summary, some old bug reports where offered to me as plausible duplicates of mine. As I investigate those bug reports, mainly from 2013 and late 2014, it seems that the timer feature exists at some point in time with its design as exposed here: http://design.canonical.com/2013/03/app-patterns-applied-clock-key-journeys/

But as it is in my BQ45r25 and from what can be read here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JvDyhsW17d1-Mz8OY1YMBKwfRI2z9qgyRjbujEsxEMk/edit#slide=id.p
it seems like at some point the clock was re-planned and developed with features and designs (from the first document) just slashed.

So I'm confused. Is anything from the clock key journeys still planned or considered? Will I be redundant with already planned features if I wish for a countdown timer?

Question information

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English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Clock App Edit question
Assignee:
Nekhelesh Ramananthan Edit question
Solved by:
Nekhelesh Ramananthan
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Revision history for this message
Best Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90) said : 		#1

Hi Dan,

The clock app journeys linked at http://design.canonical.com/2013/03/app-patterns-applied-clock-key-journeys/ are no longer followed. We got a new design directive and are currently following https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JvDyhsW17d1-Mz8OY1YMBKwfRI2z9qgyRjbujEsxEMk/edit#slide=id.p.

We definitely have a Countdown Timer in our roadmap. We're tracking its implementation at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-clock-app/+bug/1427566. You should subscribe to that bug to keep track of updates about the countdown timer. We actually have a basic wireframe design for Timer that you can find at http://i.imgur.com/KYA4PcV.png. I will get the designers to add the wireframe designs to the design document.

However at the moment, the platform (Ubuntu SDK) does not provide us with a Timers API that the Clock App can use. If you think about it, Timers are actually a special case of one-time alarms. 3rd party apps like https://uappexplorer.com/app/timer.mivoligo make use of that fact and use the Alarms API to support creating countdown timers. However they are not officially supported and are a hackish way of implementing this feature. I brought this up with the design team and they feel that it is better to wait for a official Timers API before implementing it in the clock app. So that's what we are blocked on :/ .

The side-effects of using the Alarms API to create Timers is that when a timer is running, it shows up as an alarm in the clock app and also in other parts of the system and can potentially confuse the user. So we don't want to implement a bad UX.

Hope this answers your question.

Cheers,

Nekhelesh
Clock App Developer

Revision history for this message
Dan González (gonrodda) said : 		#2

Hi Nekhelesh,

Of course, you have solved all my doubts about the topic.

I usually try to do my best on searching existing bugs but this time I miserably failed on notice bug 1427566. So thank you very much for your time and patience to answer me.

Revision history for this message
Dan González (gonrodda) said : 		#3

Thanks Nekhelesh Ramananthan, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90) said : 		#4

You're welcome :-). Feel free to raise other questions. It will help others as well since they are all public.

Revision history for this message
Markus Eisen (autobahn) said : 		#5

Dear Nekhelesh,
first of all: Thanks a lot for the invested time and know-how for developing this app!
In general, I like it very much, but there are some minor things, I would like to influence by my suggestions, if possible:

I allready posted the ideas a couple of month ago at the core apps, but I was told that this is the wrong place to do so.

Please allow me to post it here, for I still am a newbie to this launchpad-system...!

First, I thought about the snooze-Button:

When being woke up by the alarm clock, it's in the nature of things that one tends to be not perfectly "online" in the first second.
Therefore I would very much appreciate the "Snooze"-button to be MUCH larger than at the moment and I think the choice of its color could be a bit more intuitive: a big red button attracts more to be hit coming directly out of never-never-land and trying to get awake for sure (i.e. not hitting the ok button unwantedly) and without waking up other people around unnecessarily (i.e. really hitting the button and not its surrounding)...

I already made a little graphic, how I could imagine the new design (just as a principle, not a mature design, of course...):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ux/+bug/1592977/+attachment/4686361/+files/alarm.png

The second thing is the time picker:
I got my phone (BQ Aquaris) for nearly a year now, and I still struggle with the time picker.
As long as the time picker is part of your influence: Is there a chance to let the user choose how to enter an alarm time? my old phone (samsung Wave 2 with bada OS) just used a 3x4 keyboard and devided the 4 entered digits automatically into hh:mm...
Is sth. like this imagineable?

Thanks a lot for your answer!
kindest regards from Munich,

Markus