The other day, I read an article from a friend about the Pomodoro Technique. I thought it might be an intriguing thing to try…a sharp counterpoint to my “work continuously until exhausted, take a break doing something only vaguely work related until I get energy (or my caffeine has kicked in), then go back to working continuously” technique. The idea of introducing breaks is counter-intuitive for me, but I will give it a try.

To help me, I went to download an offline Pomodoro timer (because, when I work on my laptop, I'm not guaranteed Internet access) and was shocked to see that there were almost no free ones…and none of the free ones were quite what I was looking for. So I wrote one really quickly in Java just to have one that is portable enough to work almost anywhere. It's small, will run from a flash drive, and is almost assuredly poorly written.

Enjoy (source included) - to replace the alarm sound (currently Invader Zim telling you to “Prepare for some DOOM!”) you should need only replace the alarm.wav file inside the .jar with a different wave file (named, amusingly, alarm.wav)

Please, if you like it, let me know. I don't know if I'm gonna support the silly little thing, but as I add stuff that I want, I'll probably upload updates. As of now, what I want most is to put it in the system tray with the time displayed as a tool tip. We shall see.