WatchMe

FlameBrain's WatchMe is a terrific little timer tool with a twist: it incorporates multiple, independent timers in a single interface, which makes it supereasy to track multiple events. You can track everything from when food should come out of the oven to when it's time to pay the car insurance. WatchMe is portable freeware, too, so you can take it with you on a thumb drive or laptop.

We extracted WatchMe's zipped executable and opened the program. The default interface is a compact rectangle with five separate timers under a tab labeled My Timers, each with its own Start and Reset buttons, counter, and icons to add Notes, delete the timer, and move it up or down in the ranks. Timer 5 had an audible alert option, though we could add an alarm to any Timer via its individual options. The interface also has counters for Total Timers and Total Time and two file menus, Timers and Help. The clear, well-illustrated, Web-based Help file includes support requests and contacts. The Timers menu let us add and name as many new timers as we liked, as well as add and name new tabs to the interface to group timers together. We clicked Options, which opened a small properties box with settings such as always on top, the colors for running and stopped time displays, and the timer format (the default is hours-minutes-seconds). Right-clicking any timer's counter let us set or copy the time, add or subtract time in preset intervals, set hot keys, and flag the timer in a variety of colors. We simply set the time of each individual timer and clicked Start, which started the counter running and changed its background color from red to green.

WatchMe proved totally easy to customize to the needs of the moment. We could keep as few or as many timers open as we wanted, each labeled and annotated so we could tell them apart. If you're looking for a free but capable desktop timer app, look no further.