On the hunt for a simple timer app for Ubuntu? Look no further than this cute little tool, called Tea Time.
Whether you’ve a pizza in the oven, want to set aside a specific study period, or are letting some posh tea steep in water, Tea Time will be right on time.
The super simple app, Tea Time lets you quickly create, start and stop short timers that countdown for any duration you need.
Set mini alarm as and when you need them.
A Different Way To Do Things
Timer apps aren’t unique. There are plenty of time-orientated indicator applets available.
But you may not want the top-right of your screen to be overloaded with icons calling out for attention. This is how Tea Time for Ubuntu differs from, say, indicator-remindor (sic).
Using Tea Time
Once installed, you can quickly create new timers from within the app, give them a name and set a duration.
When you’re ready to run a timer you highlight it inside the app window and then click the ‘Start Timer’ button. The app minimises to the launcher when you start a timer, and a progress bar showing the time elapsed is shown on the app’s launcher icon so that you can keep an eye on it.
A bell sound effect will ring when a timer completes, letting you know that it’s time to pour the tea, fetch the pizza, or take the hamster out of the ball. A native desktop notification is also shown.
It does the job it needs to perfectly — I would say out superfluous bells and whistles tacked on, but it does have the former!
Other Notes
Tea Time is free and open source software. It’s incredibly lightweight (it’s just a couple hundred lines of Python). You can install it on Ubuntu following the instructions below.
It would be interesting to see icon themers adopt a more literal ‘egg timer’ motif, perhaps based around an egg or stopwatch rather than, as the default icon, a sleeping clock.
Important for some of you to know: the app lacks keyboard shortcuts.
Install Tea Time Timer App on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS +
To install this simple tea timer app for Ubuntu on Ubuntu 16.04 and above, open a new Terminal window and run the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teatime/ppa
sudo apt update && sudo apt install teatime-unity
Once installed, open the Unity Dash and search for, and then launch the app.
Want a command line version?
If you’re the sort of Ubuntu user who likes loading up on third party apps and extraneous PPAs, you don’t need to. There are plenty of ways to display a countdown or timer in from the command line.