Mini Pomodoro app

I have recently started using the Pomodoro method to manage my work time. It has been very effective at keeping me away from small distractions, which tend to snowball out of control, and also for enabling me to work bit-by-bit on projects without having to clearly see the end.

Initially I used an app on my phone to track the Pomodoros but it was a little buggy and I didn’t like having my phone out while working. At home I can use a physical timer, but in the library I needed something else. So I made a mini Pomodoro app of my own to run on my laptop.

Stills from the two app modes. Baby globe on the laptop and in space is copyright
of the Wikimedia Foundation staff and its contractors, CC-BY-SA-4.0.

I wrote the app in Löve, a free, open-source game engine. The initial prototype took me less than 25 minutes to put together — you can guess how I know that. I probably spent 3 hours on the project in total.

I made use of two Löve libraries: anim8 for playing animations and push for handling resolution in a scalable window. Both are a few years old but still working fine. I enjoy writing my own code from scratch but these libraries solve problems that are fiddly and boring, and I’ve been meaning to check them out for a while.