What is this?

I use countdown timers several times each day. Need to brew some tea? Setup a timer. Need to catch the bus in 20 minutes? Setup a timer. Waiting for the laundry to finish? Setup a timer. You get the idea. Because I use this functionality so much it has to be convenient. Getting out my phone, launching a timer app and telling it to start the countdown is not convenient. Much in the same way, launching applications on OS X is also not convenient if you do it by navigating to the Applications folder and double-clicking an icon. Luckily there is a nice solution for both problems. It is called Alfred.

Alfred is a Spotlight-based application launcher that uses a text-based interface. But this description does not really do it justice. Alfred is much more than that. Alfred not only launches applications it also allows you to navigate the filesystem and to access various contextual actions, for example deleting a file or emailing it to someone. Alfred is very flexible and you can extend it with custom commands called extensions. Extensions can either provide new contextual actions or additional commands.

For my daily countdown timer needs I wrote an Alfred extension. The extension allows me to start countdown timers quickly and without hassle. The extension uses Mountain Lion’s user notifications and sounds to tell you when the time is up.

All code for the extension is available on my GitHub. It is written in Python, so take a look if you are interested in extending Alfred with Python or if you want to find out how to work with Mountain Lion’s user notifications from Python.