A simple static website that only has one purpose, as its name suggests, a Big Stopwatch.
Website: https://timc986.github.io/Big-Stopwatch-Ng
- A giant big fullscreen stopwatch
- Simple, clean looking and minimalistic UI
- Dark theme and light theme
- Responsive and mobile friendly
- Fast and lightweight (81kB only!)
- An option to toggle the stopwatch by pressing the spacebar on your keyboard, no need for mouse clicking all the time
- Built with Angular version 11.0.5
- Material Icons from Iconify
Like many software developers, I enjoy writing codes and building side projects in my own time among other hobbies. I want to have a product that is truly my contribution and can be proudly shared with family and friends. Quite often I face a common problem when starting to plan for a new project: I am excited to try out on new tech new library or simply a new update, but I am not always exactly sure what to do with it. So I have written a couple of demo projects with the likes of C# .NET Core 3.1, Angular 8 and NativeScript 6 etc in the past, but they are all demo only or sometimes failed collaboration and I didn't actually publish them. Until last year.
One day I was doing my usual fitness exercises at home with an online stopwatch showing on my monitor to keep track of the exercise time. I never liked those stopwatch websites even the one that I have been using for quite sometime. Yes a stopwatch is a stopwatch, but there is something about them that feels unpleasant. Maybe it's the UI design font type font size colour, or maybe it's just that I don't enjoy my eyes being shined by the bright white light from the fullscreen all white background of the website.
With all these unpleasant sensations and myself jumping up and down in my living room in front of my computers like a madman trying to work on my pathetic core strength, suddenly I came up with a simple idea. Why don't I write one myself. For sure it should be simple enough for a first time published website, and by no means I am graphically gifted to design a mindblowing website, I think I can still do a bit better than some of the full-of-ads products. Pick your favourite colour, get a stopwatch working and place them in the way that you think it should be. This is your website, do whatever you want with it, there is no greater freedom than that!
With that thought in mind, I installed the latest version of Angular (11.0.5 by the time this background story is written) and started to work on my first ambitious project, a big stopwatch. Now I finally have a product that I will personally use everyday and perhaps I will also enjoy my fitness exercises more. It is not technically advance or cutting edge, but this is my first and it means a lot to me: I know I have done something. To some extent, a product is not fully published until there is a first user. In this case, at least I know I have one already. Thank you for reading to the end and hope you like it.