Andre Torrez

I use the built-in iOS timer daily. I pour plaster molds where timing is critical in order to get the right mix and cure time. If you mix too little or let it sit in the pot too long you’ll waste the batch.

The thing is: I hate the built-in iOS timer. First of all you have to use these dumb scrollers to pick out the length of the timer. Want twenty minutes? You have to scroll to twenty—oops, not twenty-one, not nineteen…ugh. Oh and if you wanted to add 30 more seconds to that you have to scroll to 30 on another wheel.

And my second gripe is it defaults to your last timer. Sometimes I’m doing an hour and twenty minutes for a clay mold, other times I’m just doing 3 minutes for a plaster slake. So I’m constantly scrolling back and forth using those wheels.

Also the iOS app sometimes defaults to a timer from three sessions ago, so I sometimes don’t notice I’ve chose one hour and three minutes instead of just three minutes.

My dream iOS timer app is just give me the UI of my microwave. Let me punch in 3:30, hit start, and I’m done. That’s it. So I made this and it’s great and I’m happy.

I think it’s pretty self-evident on how it works. The running screen is equally simple.

The little emojis are just different alert sounds. I dunno if it even needs it.

Anyway, now I’m happy!

We’re back from a week in Italy. It was my first time back in exactly 21 years and so much had changed. Last time we navigated without phones and used paper maps, this time went much more smoothly and it felt like we did twice as much stuff.

Anyway, I’m back and so excited to get back to work. I have hundreds of photos of art and architecture. I feel like so much of my ceramic work for the next few months is going to draw directly from what I saw. I’ll try to share it here as I make it.

I built a little web app for myself to track casting progress and firing.

The freedom to make the exact thing you need without any accommodation for future growth or other use cases is not something I used to do very often.

I’d always have a general target I’d be shooting for but the little voices of things potential users will ask for (and the time it will take to implement) was always in the back of my mind.

Now this is just for me and probably nobody else and that’s completely fine.