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kteatime - Small tray utility which reminds you of steeping tea

May 11th, 2008 edited by Patrick Murena

Article submitted by Stephan Windmüller. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

For some people coffee seems to be the only liquid they drink in front of their workstation. But for those who enjoy a cup of tea once in a while, kteatime may be a neat little helper.

I expect every one of them knows this situation: The water just boiled, you put some green tea in your cup, add the water and return to your work. 15 minutes later you realize that you forgot your tea and only dozens of sugar cubes will rescue it. ;)

kteatime helps you to prevent this situation in form of a little timer in the tray.

kteatime configuration window

After selecting the appropriate kind of tea and starting the timer it will display a little circle which turns from red to green. The tooltip informs you how long your tea will need.

When your tea is ready, kteatime informs you with a beep and a little pop-up. You can also specify a command which should be run.

tea ready pop-up

For me kteatime is the only reason besides k3b to keep the KDE libraries installed. Even as a KDE application it just works fine under XFCE.

kteatime is available since Debian Sarge (perhaps even longer) and also part of every version of Ubuntu.

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu |

8 Responses

  1. shiny Says:

    Great! I love kteatime. I’m wondering if it’ll be so usable under xfce if they revrite it into a plasmoid?

  2. Dom Says:

    I love KTeaTime because it’s an easy way to time anything you want.

    For example, for those of you familiar with the GTD (Getting Things Done) principle, you can set a timer to 2 minutes (and save it) and then be able to turn it in with only two clicks of the mouse.

    Tip: I found out it’s easier to use left mouse button for activating timers (only two clicks to activate one) as opposed to using the right mouse button where you need four clicks to start the timer of your choice (this might be obvious for many people but I was surprised when I found out I was going the harder route every time…)

  3. jens Says:

    Great! Why didn’t I know this application before?
    It could have helped me to save hectoliters of tea the last years. That’s exactly what I needed!

  4. Porges Says:

    It should be noted that there is also an equivalent available for Gnome, called simply ‘teatime’ :)

  5. Grant Says:

    This is truly a wonderful utility.

    I use it to time everything from tea time, to cooking time, to time until I leave for a meeting.

    Wonderful utility that I would not like to have to do without.

  6. David Armour Says:

    I’d like to recommend: ‘Jimmy Do’s’
    Gnome Timer-applet.

    [http://timerapplet.sourceforge.net]

    I have a number of pre-sets, one of which, ‘tea’ goes off after five minutes, and plays a very noticeable alarm.

    I had a look at Kteatime a few years back, and for my money, i.e. none!, like timer-applet better.

  7. XX Says:

    (Green) tea hydrates, coffee dehydrates. In case you want coffee, you need to drink even more water or tea to offset the effect.

    Hydration has massively greater and more lasting effect on alertness than caffeine and no real downsides until you reach insane levels.

    But they can be combined.

  8. c0d3r Says:

    thanks, cute applet :)
    and you can find more in kdetoys ;)