A Cooking Timer icon

A Cooking Timer

John Clute
$1.99

About A Cooking Timer

I have a Problem,

Needed a timer to help cook my eggs and oatmeal, so instead of looking for one in the iTunes app store, I wrote one, Ughh! - Kind of my life story. Why do something simple when there is a harder way. Did a quick search today found a lot of good looking timer apps out there that could have done what I wanted, maybe!

However what did I want why did I write this cooking timer?

The Story -

How do I time cooking my dishes that need more then one timer? More specifically how do I time cooking my breakfast, eggs and oatmeal. Before I used a Pebble watch, it had a third party timer. You can set several different times, when they finished, the watch would vibrate. (fun for all) It was perfect, unfortunately, the Pebble is no longer supported, and got a new watch. Looked for certain features, nada, nothing did all that I wanted, bummer, now what? Why not use the timer on my phone?

It worked ok, however I couldn't have more than one timer. So each time I needed more then one timer, I set a new time after the first one finished. It somewhat worked, however, there were times when I would not set the second timer; under or over cooked oatmeal. Idea, I set the phone timer and the watch timer. Again that worked somewhat, would forget about my phone and not hear the alarm, again under or over cooked oatmeal.

Then I wrote a timer script, it worked better, however, each time I would look at something else on my phone the script would stop. Again over cooked oatmeal. I was getting tired of over cooked and sometimes under cooked oatmeal, had to do something.

So, I wrote this app. It actually does what I want. The way it works, you create a timer or more. Select it from the list. start it and it counts away. If you select another one, it will wait for the first one to finish then start. Doing this was actually on purpose, my timers don't multi-task very well.

When the timer finishes, it will sound an alarm and display a message, letting you know when the timer has finished, figured it would be hard to ignore this type of alarm. The next timer starts automatically, even though an alert message is being displayed and alarm sound playing, some sounds are actually catchy, so you may want to listen to them longer.

Now, I'm using this timer every day, it has really helped out cooking dishes that need several timers, except when the app had a bug that didn't sound the alarm; or I walked away from the phone and didn't hear it, unfortunately over cooked oatmeal, things people do to make sure their apps work well. I have now fixed the bugs and keep the phone near by so I can hear it, so far no under or over cooked oatmeal.

For those interested, here is my recipe for eggs and oatmeal:

Ingredients: Old Fashion Oatmeal, water, egg or 2 depending of if you worked out before getting breakfast, turmeric, olive oil, pepper, Salsa, and Sriracha Sauce (optional)

Add water, 2 to 1 for the amount of oatmeal you want to cook
2 cups of water for 1 cup of oatmeal
add 
a dash of Turmeric
a dash of pepper
1 teaspoon -olive oil or however much you want to add, please, not the whole bottle, it gives you the runs.
Also, Olive oil helps to keep the oatmeal from boiling over.
turn burner on high
wait for the water to boil
turn down the heat
add oatmeal 
time for 3 minutes
when the timer has gone off
add egg or eggs, any number, however 2 is the suggested max.
time for 7 minutes.
when that timer goes off,
add Sriracha Sauce, to taste (Optional, for that PPP, a power packed poop)
add Salsa to taste.
mix everything together
you can eat it immediately, or let it stand for a few minutes, you don't need to time this.  

~ Enjoy

Note - If you want to gross out your family and friends tell them about eating eggs and oatmeal or just show them the dish.

A Cooking Timer Screenshots