Nice Pomodoro Timer

If you've been following pairwith.us then you may have heard us mention the the pomodoro technique.

If you're a mac user (as I now am) and use the pomodoro technique (or want to try it) you may find this timer dashboard widget useful, that with some minor tweaking looks like this:

You can have it always visible on your desktop so you don't have to hit f12 every time you want to see it. You can achieve this with a simple command to enable developer mode for the dashboard (from Dave Taylor's blog):

First, open up Terminal (Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal) and type in the following, exactly as you see here:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES 

You can just copy and paste from this Web page if you're concerned that you might type in something incorrectly, of course.

You'll get another regular system prompt within Terminal if it works, there's no other output to the defaults program.

Now log out of your account by choosing Apple --> Log Out, and log in again (You need to restart Dashboard).

Ready for the fun now? Press f12 to bring Dashboard up, then drag one of your Dashboard widgets around. While you're still dragging it around (that's critical: keep that mouse button down!) press f12 again.

Poof! Your Dashboard vanishes, but the widget's still visible.

Of course, that also works for all your other dashboard widgets too.