See Time Fly With FlipDown

FlipDown - I rarely get excited about random apps that aren’t clearly designed for productivity or have a specified purpose that seems useful or necessary in some way. However, FlipDown by InterHive is clearly an exception.

Simply put, FlipDown is a customizable countdown timer for target events. Is it necessary or even useful to have a countdown timer? Maybe not for everyone, but I think it puts a little perspective into daily life. I don’t see anything wrong with knowing exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds it is until I leave on vacation or can celebrate Christmas again. In fact, I think it’s pretty cool.

With FlipDown, you supply the date and time of any future event you’d like to track. Be it your wedding, your vacation, your spouse’s birthday, the end of school, your retirement, you name it, you can set it as an event and watch the countdown begin. With FlipDown there are a surprising number of ways to customize the event including the countdown format, the display, the background picture and whether or not to apply sound effects when the event occurs.

While some people prefer a complicated, professional looking calendar, I can see where a countdown timer supplies sort of the same information and may even be preferable to some people. At least this is how I would define FlipDown’s purpose if it has to have one. In truth, it’s just neat to see the seconds, minutes and hours ticking away, counting down the time to something you are looking forward to or something monumental that you’re not. It doesn’t really matter does it?

However you use FlipDown, it is a simple app that is easy to use and the ability to add, customize, and edit events is nice. While only one picture displays on the main screen where all your programmed events are listed, you can still customize individual events with pictures. Use a stock picture supplied with the app or use one from your own photo gallery to assign to each event. You can also choose the display format and appearance for the countdown timer for each separate event, which display from the main menu. I don’t see a way to sort events, meaning they display in the order they were added, but comparing events in relevance to time is still interesting and it’s simple to scroll down the page to see all events.

Since FlipDown is really for entertainment purposes, not so much productivity, I’m quite surprised by the options included. Within FlipDown there are several sound bytes to choose from for event sound effects and it could have been used as a daily alarm if you could assign two happenings to each event (start over and sound). But as it is, I like what FlipDown offers. For just a buck, you never have to wonder “how long until such-and-such?” again. Just open FlipDown and look.