Stage Timer
A countdown big enough to read from the back of the room, with a separate presenter view for the desk.
Setting it up before the session
Two windows, two screens. The presenter window is the one with the buttons; the stage window is the one with the enormous clock. Open the stage view, drag it to the screen the speaker can see, and put it full screen. Everything you do in the presenter window shows up there immediately.
There is no server. The two windows talk to each other through the browser itself, so no data leaves the machine and no account exists to sign into. The practical consequence is worth knowing in both directions: it works with the network unplugged, and it will not sync to a different computer.
Decide the warning point in advance. The clock turns amber at whatever threshold you set — a minute is a common choice, two minutes if the speaker needs to land a conclusion rather than just stop. Set it to zero if you would rather the colour never change.
Let it run past zero. When time is up the clock keeps counting upward in red with a minus sign. A speaker who can see they are ninety seconds over behaves differently from one looking at a clock stuck on 0:00, and the difference is usually the length of your afternoon.
Use the message line. Anything you type appears under the clock. It is far less disruptive than walking to the front, and specific messages work better than vague ones: “5 min then Q&A” tells a speaker what to do, where “hurry up” only tells them how you feel.
Finally, check the display sleep settings on the machine driving the stage screen before you start. A timer that blanks out twenty minutes into a session is the one failure this tool cannot protect you from, because it happens below the browser.
Frequently asked questions
Through a browser feature called a BroadcastChannel, which passes messages between windows on the same site in the same browser. There is no server involved and no account, which also means the sync works with no internet at all once the pages have loaded.
Yes, and that is the intended setup. Open the stage view, drag that window to the screen the speaker sees, and put it full screen. Keep the presenter window on your laptop to control it.
No. Sync is between windows in the same browser on the same machine, which is what lets it work with no server and no account. For a second computer, run a separate timer on it.
Yes. The plus and minus one-minute buttons change the length while the clock is running, and the stage view updates immediately. That is usually kinder than letting a speaker run into a red screen they cannot do anything about.
The clock keeps counting, upward, with a minus sign and in red. Knowing you are two minutes over is far more useful to a speaker than a clock frozen at zero.
Yes. Anything you type in the message field appears under the clock on the stage screen. Useful for "wrap up", "Q&A next", or the time you are coming back from a break.
That depends on the machine, not the page. Set the display to never sleep in the operating system before the session, and put the browser in full screen so no toolbars are visible.
The stage view is marked no-index because it is a display, not a page anyone should land on from a search. This page, the one you set the timer up on, is indexed normally.
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