Live Curtain is a simple countdown clock and text banner in your browser. You can use it to share a message and a countdown in your online meetings, stand-ups, lessons, etc. It's free, no registration required. Just open it up in your browser, and then share the window in your meeting app.

Like everybody else, I've been in many online meetings and workshops since lockdown started. For most of these meetings, whenever we have a break, we leave the meeting open. To tell people when to come back, we might put some text in the chat, or verbally agree a time.

But I wanted to be able to display a message like "back in 10 minutes", in a nicer way. I also thought it would be a good learning exercise in how to write a web app. (I'm mostly in Java/DevOps/Kubernetes at the moment - and modern web dev has almost completely passed me by).

You type your message, set a countdown and optionally choose a theme. You can go full-screen too. You could potentially use it for kiosks, office monitors, or anywhere where you want to display a message and you don't want (or can't) fire up a slide deck.

I created a prototype of this in vanilla JS last year. (Lots of document.getElementById()...) It was great for getting comfortable with the basics of JavaScript.

Then I went away and created this 1.0 version in SvelteJS. I wanted to use the project to learn one of the modern JavaScript frameworks. I started with React first, but struggled quite a lot with it; getting a broad understanding of the React ecosystem was hard, and some of the tutorials I found online were out of date.

By contrast, Svelte has been a fun developer experience. The template project on GitHub is great, and then Svelte just gets out of the way. I'm surprised at what I was able to create, with little effort. The styling is done in TailwindCSS, which is a slog to begin with, but became easier after a while.

All hosted with Netlify, which has been a great experience also.

For me, this project has been about teaching an old dog new tricks, and having a tool that I can use day-to-day. Hope you find use for it too.

Tom