After I explained to my actual working team how they can be more productive using the Pomodoro Technique, they spent some minutes looking for a utility to use a countdown clock.
The Idea#
Yes guys, we are geeks! Even if we can use anything else as timer, we always look for something cool to install on our PC :D Someone asked me if there was anything for team work: a way to show the Pomodoro timer of the others in your team to know when you could talk with them. And, after minutes of search on the net without results, I decided to spend a couple of hours to create an example of the proposed Team Pomodoro :D
So, here you are: ePomodoro! It’s an Eclipse Plugin, so you can install it directly in your Eclipse environment (in the future I could create a stand alone application for all non-eclipse developers or non-developers ;))
Features#
In Windows->Preferences Menu you can change some plugin settings like: Team Name and Pomodoro Timer. Team Name allows different team in your society: you will get just messages from your team!
Current Status#
At the moment, even if it works (both as a countdown clock and team message), it’s just a simple raw plugin to demonstrate how easy it is to create something like this using the JGroups library as message broadcaster. I’ll set aside some time to add cool functions to it in the next days.