Prevent resetting the break timer, allow early break termination, and allow auto-starting the work phase

[drewfrank]

Hi,

I made a few small changes that I thought might be of interest:

1. Under current behavior, clicking a running break timer will reset it to its maximum duration. I changed the semantics of the current option so it only resets work timers (no cheating!), and added a new option that makes clicking on a running break timer end the break early.
2. Under current behavior, when the break timer expires the "blocked" sites remain unblocked until the next work phase is initiated. I added an option to automatically start the work phase as soon as the break timer finishes.

Known issues:

• I only added the option strings in English.
• When autoContinue is set, no notification appears at the end of the break phase. I don't know what the behavior should be, here...maybe this is okay.

[matchu]

Interesting :)

First change seems reasonable, though I'm not sure it has any effect outside of the scope second change. (By default, cheating to extend breaks is trivial: just put off starting the work timer.)

Second change concerns me, though. Currently, the only way to break out of a timer cycle is to, once the break timer ends, never start a new work timer. Under autoContinue, what do we expect users to do when they're all done with their work?

I'm considering adding a new popup UI in the next release to offer more details on the current timer state and perhaps offer early cancels and a cleaner version of resets. Maybe that'll affect the answer to the question on the second change.

[drewfrank]

Good point. Currently I just disable the extension to break out of the cycle...effective, but not very elegant. Maybe there should be "on/off" modes within the extension aside from the browser enable/disable switch.

[matchu]

Hmm. That could be integrated into the popup UI… though, if the timers are automatically moving on, we'd need to think about when a user is allowed to turn the cycle off. Then, how would this affect the non-automatic UI?

[drewfrank]

I guess the on/off functionality would be sort of redundant when the auto-continue setting is disabled. It might be better to just add an auto-continue toggle to the popup UI (which may be what you were thinking of originally). I would restrict access to that setting during work time, in keeping with the "strict" theme of the extension.

[alxlive]

I would like to give another vote to being able to cut through a break. The reason is the following: I don't want to be on my computer during my breaks. Sometimes I actually have to close it and put it in my bag, in case I am in a public space and want to go do something away from my table for 5 minutes. In those cases, running the break timer is not possible, but I am taking my break and would like to be able to return to work immediately after reopening my computer.

As for the popup, what do you have in mind? I hope there will be some option to keep the current behavior, as I think it's absolutely fantastic that all interaction with Strict Pomodoro is done solely by clicking on the icon. Going through a popup seems like a lot of extra work and inconvenience.

[matchu]

Yeah, one of my goals with the popup is to add to the existing experience rather than replace it. Clicking the button will still start the next timer in one click, and also provide some quick details about what the user just did and, just for a few seconds, offer the ability to undo, in case it was a misclick.

I expect that this'll feel just as smooth, but we'll have to play with it and see. If it's still a bit jarring just to see the popup and to explicitly click somewhere else to make it go away, then we'll probably add an option to make the popup only appear when clicking on an already-running timer. We'll see.

And yeah, the current (sketchy) draft of 2.0 looks like break-skipping oughta be pretty straightforward :)