← Naseer Ahmed · Built

Tickr

Desktop app · Designed and built by me

A tiny always-on-top timer that sits in the corner of your screen. I designed it and wrote it with Claude, in Tauri and vanilla JavaScript, and shipped installers for macOS and Windows.

I kept missing timers because they lived in a tab I had stopped looking at. So the whole premise is that the timer never hides.

Stack
Tauri, Rust, vanilla JS
License
MIT, open source
Platforms
macOS, Windows
The Tickr window running on a desktop, showing a countdown and the task it is timing.

Why you type at it

Every timer I have used is buttons. Buttons need chrome, chrome needs space, and space is the one thing an always-on-top window cannot spend. A window big enough for a control panel is a window you end up closing.

So there are no controls. You click the scrolling task text and type a command. One input replaces the whole panel, and the window stays small enough to forget about while still being visible.

The syntax is deliberately strange. A backslash to open, an angle bracket to close, which makes it obvious you are issuing a command rather than editing your task name. It also makes the thing feel like equipment rather than an app, which is the register I wanted.

Tickr running, with commands typed liveWatch on YouTube ↗

The command set

\PAUSE>
Pause
\RESUME>
Resume
\HALF>
Cut the remaining time in half
\RUSH>
Jump to fifteen seconds left
\BREAK 5>
Start a five minute break, focus session held
\BACK>
Return from the break to where you were
\+10>
Add ten minutes
\-3>
Take off three minutes
\RESET>
Back to the original duration
\END>
Close the window

Rush exists because I kept wanting to skip the last stretch. It is honest about how timers actually get used.

Tickr's setup panel, the running countdown, and the break and overtime states side by side.

On building it with Claude

I am not an engineer. I wrote this with Claude, which means I made every product and interface decision and had a lot of help turning them into working Rust and JavaScript.

What that changes for my day job is the handoff. Once you have argued with a real always-on-top window about focus behaviour and window chrome across two operating systems, you stop drawing states that only make sense in a Figma frame. It has made me a cheaper designer to work with.