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Tomatoes to Oranges, The Concentrate Story

Along with OS X and iPhone development, I also do some work on the web, mostly in Ruby. In early March I was in Salt Lake City attending the Mountain West Ruby Conf. It was there that I learned of the Pomodoro Technique. In short, the Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that says work on something, one thing, with 100% focus for 25 minutes. After those 25 minutes are up, take a mandatory 5 minute break. Rinse and repeat. There’s a good bit more to it, but that’s the core. After reading up and trying out the technique I decided I wanted to take a stab at building an application to help me apply the technique.

April 1, 2009, PomoDesk was born

I had big plans for this app. Along with being a simple timer it was also going to:

• let you define your tasks to do that day
• estimate the number of pomodoros each task would take (that’s what they call a block of 25 minutes)
• see graphs of successful pomodoros for analysis
• remove distractions while in a pomodoro by blocking websites, quitting apps, etc.

And on top of all that I even wanted to build a custom hardware timer (my dad does that kind of thing) that integrated with my software. In my mind it was, and still is, awesome. But it’s beyond what I can do in the amount of time I was allotting myself.

After spending a solid month or so working on PomoDesk I realized this thing needed to be scaled down. To get it under control I started by trying to detach from the specifics of the Pomodoro Technique, and make it a more generic app.

Here’s two sketches of the UI. Lots going on here:

May 19th, PomoDesk becomes Focalize

Of course it would need a new name. Focalize was going to be PomoDesk without being tied to the Pomodoro Technique and without the todo list. So now it was a timer that could show you graphs of where you’re spending your time as well as a tool to remove distractions.

Here’s a sketch of the action listing. It’s getting closer. The detailed graph feature has been yanked, but a simplified version is still seen in the lower left:

And here’s me playing with different locations for the actions listing.

June 6th, Focalize becomes Blinders

Not being content with the name Focalize, and failing to come up with a good icon concept, the name changed to Blinders. The icon was going to be a race horse with its hood on. Along with a new name, the graphing feature was removed. So now Blinders is an app to remove distractions. We’re getting close!

This sketch is pretty much the main Concentrate UI, but with sparkbars showing time spent. The sparkbars is something I plan to add eventually, but I’m surprised at how few people have requested any visualization of where they’re spending their concentrated time. If you want it, let me know in the comments!

June 17th, Blinders takes shape and becomes Concentrate

The sketch above is from June 17th has the first sketch that resembles what Concentrate’s UI became. This is also the date a friend recommended the name Concentrate. It was the first name that really felt right. It stuck immediately.

At this point Concentrate’s scope was well defined: An application to eliminate distractions. It had a name and an icon concept. From here on out time flew as I put my head down and got to work.

Well, that’s how Concentrate came to be. Over the course of all that time many icon concepts were worked on by Dave of Typewriter Creative. Here are most of them for your viewing pleasure (remember, most of these were just rough ideas to let me see what he was picturing):

We never did work on the horse icon.

And of course, here’s the concentrate icon:

And after all that, on Tuesday, July 28th, Concentrate will be made available as a pre-release beta to everyone. Sign up on the home page to be notified when it’s ready.