Introducing VOTimer

By Harri, 15 April, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Another month, another app; Apple approved my VOTimer today. VOTimer is a simple countdown timer. My design goals for this release were to make a timer that 1. is fast and intuitive to use 2. is usable without touching, in the kitchen your hands are often dirty. 3. is accessible with VoiceOver and providing a low vision friendly UI. 4. will continue to run if I have to exit the app to check something else. 5. has a variety of alarm sounds. To achieve the above, I fitted a big numeric keypad that you can use to enter the time. On an ipad the buttons are big enough that you can use your elbow to push them in a pinch, just don't push too hard. With an iPhone the timer can be paused, resumed and silenced with the proximity sensor, no need for touching. You can even use voice commands to set the timer, for completely hands free operation. Even with Siri you need to touch the phone to indicate you want to say something. With VOTimer the speech recognition is continuous, just pause for one second after speaking and your command will be carried out. VOTimer understands adult native English speakers the best. The speech recognition accuracy should quite good and it will improve in future releases. In order to assess if VOTimer lives to its promise, here are 3 codes for the quick. TFLFY4FKLE4Y FJPP4ALA97ET RL76NRHHM4H7 It is available from iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/app/votimer/id631181941 Let me know if there is some feature you'd like to see, or if I think something should be improved. Regards, Harri

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Comments

By Robert A.M. on Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - 09:22

Hi Harri, how are you my friend? Nice to see you are continuing the effort of developing VoiceOver accessible apps; I don't have particular need of a timer so I won't be downloading this one but I wish you the best of luck with it. I, instead, would like to give you a couple of suggestions for future apps: 1. A VoiceOver accessible recorder, similar to Voice Memos but with better record/pause controls and audio file editing and organizing tools. 2. A better weather app in which VoiceOver would speak more detailed descriptions of the information provided by the source (I know this would be a real challenge). 3. An even bigger challenge, an app capable of creating and editing MS Office documents, Dropbox support would be greatly appreciated. 4. An app for generating ringtones from the songs in the device's music library in which the starting point and length of the ringtone could be edited with 0.1 second accuracy. There are several apps that do this in the App Store but none offers full VoiceOver support. Hope you find these suggestions helpful, best of luck!

By Harri on Thursday, May 23, 2013 - 09:22

I updated VOTimer to v1.1 Changes: Audio routing changed so that VoiceOver stays in the headset if one is connected. This makes VOTimer more friendly to use in meetings. Added a configuration option for the alarm sound itself, it can be configured to go to speakers, or kept in the headset. Improved wording in VoiceOver tutorial for setting the time. For timers longer than an hour, you set the time as you would write it down. If you tap 1 2 0 it means a timer for 1 hour and 20 minutes. If you enter more than 59 minutes, it is automatically converted to hours and minutes. So 90 minutes will be converted to 1 hour 30 minutes. Made using the proximity sensor optional. As I'm not using VoiceOver myself, I would accidentally sometimes pause the timer via proximity sensor. Also now if VoiceOver is not running, I added a notification sound when pausing via the proximity sensor. A little improvement in the speech recognition response time. Enjoy, Harri

Thanks Harry for the wonderful update!