Sunset countdown timer

At a glance

Why a sun is the honest clock for evenings

The origin story of the sunset skin, from the people who drew it.

Long before anyone counted minutes, people read time by the sun's height over the water, and the sunset skin leans on that old reflex. A countdown that ends when the sun touches the sea needs no translation for anyone who has ever thought “we should head back before sundown.” It is the gentlest deadline on the site — which is exactly why it belongs to the end of the day, when a red ring would feel like an alarm.

The sky does most of the storytelling, so it is drawn as a gradient that travels. At the start it is late afternoon — a deep blue overhead falling into warm orange near the horizon, the sun a pale gold disc with a wide, soft glow. As the countdown elapses, the whole gradient interpolates toward dusk: the blues deepen toward ink, the warm band cools, the sun reddens as it nears the water, and its shimmering reflection on the sea — a wobbling column of drawn highlights, not a static stripe — weakens as the light goes. Stars begin arriving from about halfway — they twinkle in slowly, each at its own phase, until the last stretch runs under a field of them.

Zero gets a moment instead of a jolt. When the sun reaches the horizon, a low band of afterglow lingers along the waterline — the warm memory of the day — and a distant harbour bell sounds, low notes fading into the evening. For anyone who has ever tried to get children through a bedtime routine, “when the sun has gone down” is a far more negotiable-sounding deadline than “25:00”, even though it is exactly the same clock underneath.

Golden hour mode exists because not every timer is a goodbye: set the Sky option and the whole session stays in that warm late-afternoon light, the sun simply setting more slowly than the evening can follow. It became the quiet favourite for dinner timers — the room gets to keep the light.

How the scene moves

• Idle. A warm evening: sun high with a soft glow, a few clouds drifting, gentle wave lines on the sea.
• Running. The sun sinks and reddens with the countdown while the whole sky gradient slides toward dusk; its shimmering reflection weakens on the water; stars begin to arrive past the halfway point.
• The last stretch. The disc sits nearly on the horizon, the sky is deep ink above it, and the star field is fully out.
• Zero. The sun touches the water and slips below; an afterglow band lingers on the horizon and a low harbour bell fades in and out. The readout counts up +mm:ss overtime until you reset — and resetting walks the sun back up out of the sea, which is the part everyone replays.

Make it yours

The sliders button in the bottom control row opens Scene settings. Choices are stored in your browser and survive reloads; nothing is sent anywhere.

Two shared panels live in the same place for every skin. Sound picks the finish chime (or “match the skin”), sets the volume, and adds an optional tick for each of the last ten seconds. Display moves the countdown readout — bottom, top, centre, bottom-left or bottom-right — and recolours it: follow theme, warm white, white, gold, ice blue or coral.

Copy-paste links

The sound it makes

Zero is marked by a distant harbour bell — warm, low strikes that fade into the evening the way the light does. Like everything in timer.cool, the sound is synthesized by the browser at the moment it plays: no audio files, nothing to download. The Sound panel can swap in a bell, digital beep, wood block or alarm, add a tick to each of the last ten seconds, or you can mute with M.

On a projector or TV

A sunset on the big screen changes what a room feels like by the end of a timer — the light in the scene eases the room toward whatever comes next. Press F and every control disappears. While a timer runs, the page holds a wake lock so the display does not dim before the sun goes down.

The keyboard map: Space start/pause, F fullscreen, R reset, M mute, +/− give or take a minute while running, L repeat. Two honest limits: on an iPhone the ringer switch silences web audio, and aggressive battery-saver modes can override the wake lock on some devices.

Who the sunset is for

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