Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues held a couple of Pecha Kucha sessions. Pecha Kucha is a presentation methodology that limits the presentation to 20 slides where the next slide is displayed after 20 seconds automatically. During the preparation and for the presentation session we felt the lack for a decent timer that counts down from 20 to1 for each slide and gives a clearly visible feedback before the time for the current slide ends.

Although there are already some timers available, like this HTML timer from MuckyFeet.com or the PechaKucha Trainer Android application, we did not feel that these met our needs. Therefore I hacked this Pecha Kucha Timer application using Adobe Flex.

This Pecha Kucha Timer shows the current second in a big number that counts down to 1 and restarts at 20 for each of the 20 slides. The font size can be adjusted, so you can run it in the corner of your screen for practicing your slides, or you can display it at fullscreen size on a monitor during your presentation. For the last three seconds the background changes between different shades of red.

The timer just requires a Flash plugin - therefore it can run in any browser supporting Flash plugins or using the FlashPlayer Projector standalone executable. You can run the Pecha Kucher Timer directly from here or download it for free on your client for offline use.

One tip! When you are working with PowerPoint, click on the timer about one second after starting the PowerPoint presentation as PowerPoint takes about 1 second to initialize the presentation.