Fans of Android developer Sam Ruston's applications, such as myself, will be excited to hear that he has just released one more. The app, called Hurry, is a countdown timer that uses notifications and widgets to help you keep track of upcoming events. It is a simple concept but executed with the developer's usual insane attention to detail, especially in relation to material design and animations.

I gave the app a quick test drive today and found myself really enjoying it. The functionality is fairly obvious, it's a countdown timer for keeping track of the time remaining until set events. It's a simple idea, and that's fine. The app might not appeal to everyone, but in use it's hard to describe it as anything other than fun, and I hope it finds an audience. Hurry has an intuitive and colorful interface, an unexpected number of extra little features, and a tasteful use of animation. The whole package combines together with that tiny bit of flair that makes interacting with it a very satisfying, dopamine-filled experience. And, it really gets you excited about whatever you have planned.

To make an event in Hurry, you open the app and tap the FAB, which takes you to the New Event page. From here you can give your event a title, set a time, and choose a location. It also allows for you to select your own photos for the event, or you can trust that it will find the right GIFs on Giphy for you. In my experience, it did a decent job finding appropriate assets for general activities, but you might want to select some of your own for specific things.

As you can see, the layout is simple and follows Google's Material Design guidelines quite well. But the real show-stoppers manifest themselves via the attention to detail and the variety of animations. They're quite tasteful and subtle, accenting things without drawing too much of your attention. Some good examples are the rising balloons in the event creation page, or the marching dotted line border around the empty list of events. Everything combines together into a package that's quite pleasant to see and use.

Once you have your events added they are all listed together inside the app. It's hard not to get all fanboy on this, but it looks awesome, with bold use of color and shapes. It might be a bit too high-contrast for some, but it's a very striking look. I wish that Sam Ruston was my interior decorator.

You can tap to open each event, and it gives a bunch of little features like a minigame where you guess how long the remaining time approximates other actions, and a share button to send info about the remaining time until the event to your friends. You can also customize how often notifications for events appear, you get a window to pan around the area of the event in Google Maps if a location was set.

You can even keep an eye on the clock for each event as they count down via a series of quite attractive looking widgets, which come in a wide variety of transparencies and color settings to perfectly match whatever look you have going. Some of them use those images you set for events earlier, too, so you can psych yourself up with just a glance.

The app is a simple idea taken to an extreme, with almost every possible feature related to an event countdown packed inside it. The only thing I lamented was that you couldn't pull a pre-existing event in from your own calendar, but I don't think there is an easy way for an app to do something like that.

Hurry also has a tiny footprint; downloading it will pull down a mere 1.4 MB of data, and once installed it only further consumes a paltry 4.5 MB of storage. It's incredibly tiny for how much it has going on. This app is very much a model of how much one can accomplish in functionality with so little space.

Hurry is live now over at Google Play and APK Mirror. If you're a fan of the developer's other works, like Weather Timeline, and you like to keep track of and build excitement for future events, this could be your jam. Even if that use-case doesn't fit your life, the app is beautiful.