We have a really simple and elegant interaction pattern in the humble kitchen timer.
Just rotate a single knob and it starts ticking.
I find myself sometimes on a train, or at an airport. I need to be somewhere at a certain time, or I have 10 minutes to relax till my next stop. But I know myself. I have tendency to lose track of time.
So I want something that will bring time back into focus. And I want to be able to set that as quickly and easily as possible. Sometimes its 5 minutes. Sometimes its 7 minutes. And sometimes I know its at 14:35, and its currently 14:12.
I don’t want to pick from a list of previous timers. I don’t want to click “+” and fiddle with HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS dials. I also don’t want to say “Hey Siri, set a timer for 17 minutes” because I’m sometimes in situations where I can’t talk out loud.
I just want a kitchen timer on my wrist.
What I discovered as I designed it is that when you mashup a kitchen timer with a clock face, you gain something and you lose something. You can now target (roughly) how long the timer should be in minutes, as well as when the timer should end. But it’s not well suited to setting very short timers (under a minute) or very long timers (over an hour).
I have it working on my Apple Watch, built with SwiftUI almost a year ago actually. Just haven’t found the time to write about it until now.
The key interaction is that you rotate the crown to set the timer duration, just like a kitchen timer. The watch face shows the current time, and as you turn the crown, a highlighted arc appears on the watch face indicating when the timer will go off.
When you stop turning the crown, the timer starts immediately. You can see the remaining time as a shrinking arc on the watch face.
I’ll be writing more about further development of this app in 2026. I still want to add a complication and activity widgets so I can just launch it quickly from the watch face and see the remaining time from the various locations Apple allows. And then I want to actually release it on the App Store.
Would something like this appeal to you?