Cat Timer

Mittens the Cat!
Chrome extension minimalist view.
Web app view before the timer is started showcasing the innocent, unassuming Mittens.

Inspiration

Our members of our team all love cats and struggle to focus on studying. This extension helps combine these common factors and make us better people through the art of emotional blackmail.

What it does

Have you ever struggled with studying? Is the pull of social media just too strong? Are basic Pomodoro timers just not effective because you know nothing is going to happen if you don't follow them?

Introducing the cat timer! Unlike most Pomodoro timers you can find, the cat timer is a chrome extension that tracks how much time you spend on social media websites, such as Facebook and Instagram, as well as educational websites such as MyCourses and Github. Furthermore, as a studious, responsible, and mature student, you are now the primary caretaker of Mittens the Cat! If you ever try to end the timer prematurely, Mittens gets whacked with a hammer. Now, if you ever procrastinate, you have to live with the guilt that you might have killed a cat!

How we built it

This timer was built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We built two HTML pages, one for the web application and one for the chrome extension, which we then connected through JavaScript and styled using CSS. The chrome extension is a starter miniature version of the application where you can start and stop the timer, and you also have the option to visit the web page for full features such as the analytics of the activity tracker. The art was created using pixilart.com.

Challenges we ran into

Some hiccups included not knowing how to make a timer count down in a nice format, struggling to make our web app a chrome extension, and figuring out how to store and access user data. Of the three, the biggest challenge would be the chrome extension, since we had to work with some special event listeners in JavaScript to make the same functions we had for the web app run in the chrome extension too.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to figure out how to track the time the user spends on certain websites, that we were able to figure out how to animate animal cruelty, and that we were able to make a chrome extension (without any prior knowledge on how to do it)!

What we learned

Although some of us knew a little bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript before, some of us have never done web development before so it was definitely a learning curve! We learned more about how to make a chrome extension, how to track the websites a user visits, and how to merge back-end and front-end code to make a full-stack application.

What's next for Cat Timer

We are thinking of giving an animated run-down of how much time you spent procrastinating on social media websites where Mittens gets whacked if you visited pages such as Facebook or Instagram! We were also considering giving him lives that he loses every whack, and animating the ghost of Mittens the Cat if the user procrastinates too much, so the user would have to live with the guilt of killing a cat. Even though we initially planned a Pomodoro timer, we are also open to extending the app to allow the user to input how much time they are planning to spend studying, and then the program would split it into increments with breaks in between to maximize focus time.