secondsinsight.

§ the shop · one released, twelve not

instruments for reading a stretch of time while it passes.

Everything here is a piece of a chronoscape. One of them exists and is free on Mac today. The rest are drawings and notes. Nothing on this site takes a payment, a pre-order or an email address, and the free ways of doing the same job are listed first, because they work.

§ 01 · first

nobody needs to buy anything here

seven things that cost nothing

Nobody needs to buy anything on this page to change their relationship to time. The argument in the museum is about attention and about how a duration is displayed, and both of those can be handled with objects already in the room. What follows is the shortest useful version, and every one of them is a chronoscape cue.

  • Sunlight on a wall.

    Mark where the edge of the light falls when you sit down. Look again when you next stand up. The wall holds a record of the interval and asks nothing of you while it runs.

  • A candle.

    It shows a length rather than a time of day, and it shows it from across the room. Scratch marks into the wax if you want divisions. Draughts and weather make a flame an unreliable instrument, which is documented at some length80 and does not matter for a working afternoon.

  • Something whose length you already know.

    A side of a record, a wash cycle, a kettle, the walk to the shop. Any of these is a unit you have already calibrated by using it. Two of them end the interval more usefully than a number does.

  • Say the length out loud before you start.

    Then add to it. Estimates of one's own tasks run short in a known direction, and knowing the direction is enough to correct for it82.

  • Name the slack in your calendar.

    Give the gaps a name and a length so they read as objects rather than as free space. About a minute a day. The reasoning is in the alternative.

  • Any timer that shows a shape instead of digits.

    A bar, a ring, a row of tiles, a tone that widens. Attending to a clock is itself one of the things that stretches an interval4142, so a display that can be read without being consulted is the whole requirement. The software below is one way of meeting it and not the only one.

  • Ask the institution to move before you rearrange yourself.

    The change to a population's timing that has a review behind it was made by schools shifting their start, rather than by pupils trying harder86. Where a start time is negotiable, negotiating it will do more than any object on this page.

If one of the things below suits you better than a candle, buy it when it exists. The argument on this site does not depend on your doing so, and none of it is withheld from anyone who does not.

§ 02 · released

the timer, for Mac and iPhone

free on mac today

The Mac menu-bar panel: a large pale coin on a soft grey ground, ringed with tick marks, about a third of them coloured in. A horizontal teal line crosses the coin, labelled 70 per cent beside a small speaker icon — that line is the volume. In the middle sits a dark split button, a teal pause on the left half and a magenta stop on the right, with 17:23 of 25:00 beneath it and 30 per cent below that. Under the coin: chips from plus 5 to plus 60, a progress bar, a row of minute dots, and a bar for the whole day reading 17 min and ends 12:43 pm, with a magnified inset of one hour marking your 17 min, done by 5:00 am.
mac · menu-bar panel — seventeen minutes from the end. Click the eye in the menu bar and this opens: no window, no Dock icon, nothing in Command-Tab. Shot from the current build, older palette and all.

A stretch of time drawn in light and sound while it passes, so you can stop checking the clock and still know where you are. Built for time blindness, useful for anyone. The reasoning is in room 06 and on the alternative.

Nineteen ways to show a duration, one switch each. Keep the two or three that work on you and turn the other sixteen off. Nine of them are audible, so it works with the screen ignored, dark, or no use to you at all. Controls are labelled for VoiceOver on both platforms.

Download for Mac free
  • Mac, directfree, available now
  • iPhonein app store review
  • Mac, App Storeto follow
  • Sourcereadable, polyform noncommercial

The Mac download is unsigned, so right-click the app and choose Open the first time, past the macOS warning. A notarised build is coming. The paid apps arrive on the App Store, where Apple is merchant of record; one purchase covers both platforms and there is no subscription.

A small round always-on-top window about the size of a coaster: a pale disc showing 17:23 in heavy dark digits, encircled by a ring that is roughly two-thirds olive green and one-third empty.
floating coin — sits over whatever you are working in, never takes keyboard focus, never scrolls away. Shown close to actual size.
A strip of the menu-bar icon at successive stages of a timer, each drawn at two sizes. It begins as a narrow, almost shut eye, opens wider as time passes, the pupil swelling until it fills nearly the whole shape, and ends as a solid filled eye with a small spark at its upper right. The same run appears twice: once on a light menu bar and once, underneath, on a dark one.
menu-bar eye — a slit at idle, wide near halfway, all pupil at the end, with a spark once you are past it. Read it without opening or focusing anything. Drag the strip sideways for the later stages.

On iPhone: one screen, nothing to navigate

The iPhone timer running. A pale coin fills the upper screen; the ring of ticks around it has turned teal for the first third. A teal line crosses the coin at 60 per cent, marking the volume. In the centre a dark split button holds a teal pause and a magenta stop. Below it the digits read 17:19 of 25:00, then 31 per cent. Beneath the coin: a progress bar filled a third, a row of minute dots with seven lit, the plus-5 to plus-60 chips, and a day bar labelled 17 min and ends 11:00 pm, with a magnified inset of the 7 to 8 pm hour marking your 17 min, done by 7:48 pm, fits 12 times more.
running — the strip at the foot magnifies twenty-five minutes inside the actual evening, beside the twelve more like it that still fit.
The same iPhone timer, nineteen seconds past the end. Every tick on the ring has flipped from teal to magenta, the background has drifted to pale pink, and the digits read plus 00:19 OVER at 100 per cent. The teal volume line still crosses the coin with a speaker badge reading 60 per cent, and the bar below the coin is one solid magenta band with a single magenta dot underneath. The day bar reads 0 min, ends 11:00 pm.
past the end — the ring flips to magenta, the screen washes pink, and it keeps counting up, readable from across the room.
A sheet titled BENCH covering the lower two-thirds of the iPhone screen, the dimmed timer coin still visible above. Left column headed SEE TIME: digits, percent, bar-ring and progress bar are switched on, with fill chosen over drain; dots and tint on; blob off. Right column headed HEAR TIME: pings on with 5m chosen from 1m, 5m, 10m and 15m; alarm on; chimes, pulse, tick, drone, metronome and jazz off. Centred underneath, a dial labelled ESCALATE 50 per cent with a teal arc filling half its circle.
the bench — one switch per mode, see on the left and hear on the right, both columns in view at once with nothing three taps deep. Shot before the audio was rebuilt, so its hear column is out of date; the lists below are current.

see time · ten

  • Big digitsplain and large
  • Percentone number
  • Depleting ringticks emptying
  • Progress barfill or drain
  • Minute dotsone dot per minute
  • Ambient tintscreen drifts colour
  • Shrinking shapegets smaller
  • Your whole daywith a zoom-in
  • Menu-bar metermac
  • Floating coinmac · always on top

hear time · nine

  • End soundsoft landing or alarm
  • Harmonic dispersionone tone widens
  • Phase shifttwo copies drift, rejoin at zero
  • Interval pings1 · 5 · 10 · 15 min
  • Milestone chimes25 · 50 · 75 · 100%
  • Final-minute pulsepitch steps down
  • Pulse bed0.5 · 1 · 2 a second
  • Ambient droneswells
  • Noise beddeep to bright

The phase-shift mode is lifted directly from Reich's phase pieces, which are in room 08: two copies of the same figure, one drifting against the other, rejoining at zero.

What lands next in the timer

free updates · no dates, because they are not known

  • Lock-screen and Dynamic Island glance on iPhone, as a Live Activity, mirroring to the Apple Watch Smart Stack.

    not shipped · in development

  • Calendar-driven timers: a timer that starts itself when an event begins, for that event's length.

    on iPhone now · Mac next

  • Haptic time on Apple Watch: duration as pulses on the wrist.

    not shipped · planned

  • More of the durational vocabulary: a compositional lifecycle mode, a figure that forms, dissolves and re-crystallises.

    dispersion and phase shift ship today · lifecycle mode not shipped

  • A magnitude channel: a session weighted by how heavy the event is as well as how long it runs.

    not shipped · planned

§ 03 · unmade

the objects

coming soon · no link, no price

Six pieces of a chronoscape, none of them made yet. Each measures an interval by a sense other than reading. They are listed here so the range is legible, and there is nothing on this page that takes money for an object that does not exist.

an incense clock

Duration by scent, moving through three registers, after the incense seals described in the reading79.

coming soon

a light clock

A room whose light warms across ninety minutes, so the interval is read off the walls.

coming soon

a tape and loop piece

One composition playing slower on every pass, so the count is carried by the medium itself.

coming soon

a tessera wall clock

The mosaic as an object on a wall: one tile filling for each unit, at whatever size the wall allows.

coming soon

a browser extension

The same reading of a duration, in the tab you are looking at.

coming soon

glance surfaces

A running interval on the lock screen and the watch face, with nothing to open.

coming soon

§ 04 · unmade

merchandise

coming soon · no link, no price

Printed and worn things, on the same terms as the objects. Each one carries a piece of the argument rather than a slogan, and none of them is necessary to any of it.

an hour, printed

The sixty-tile hour from the front page, screenprinted at A2 in the two accent inks on cool paper stock.

coming soon

the timeline, printed

Shadow clock to caesium standard, the whole of fig. 02 from the museum, printed long and narrow for a corridor.

coming soon

a duration notebook

Ruled in tessera rows rather than lines, so a page is planned in lengths before anything is given a time.

coming soon

the tessera mark, in enamel

The single accent square from the top right of every icon in the house, at pin size.

coming soon

a wordmark shirt

One lowercase word across the chest, with the hinge in the middle set in the accent hue. Slate ground or paper ground.

coming soon

a marked candle

Scored across at the quarter hours, so the free suggestion at the top of this page comes ready-divided. Draughts still apply.

coming soon

Nothing in this section can be bought, reserved or waited for. When one of them exists it will get a price and a way to pay for it, and until then it is a note. The source for the timer sits under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence, so you can read exactly what runs it.

What a chronoscape is
Defined once, in plain words, on the page the rest of the site refers back to.

Why any of this
Room 06: interval timing, attention and arousal, ADHD, circadian drift.

The objection
What is being claimed on this site, and what is not.