Play Timer (formerly know as MPRIS Timer) is one of many free and open-source timer apps for Linux. Be that as it may, there are a few things that make Play Timer stand out from the crowd.

For starters, it's a GTK4/Adwaita app, so it looks and feels right at home on GNOME ecosystems. Secondly, it boasts seamless GNOME integration via a pretty interesting "trick."

In short, the GNOME integration is accomplished by the app by "pretending to be a media player," and I have to say, the results are not half bad. For those who are not familiar with MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification), it's a D-Bus standard interface that provides a common API for controlling media players.

Even though, at the end of the day Play Timer is a simple timer app for GNOME, there are a lot of nice things about it. The first one is, of course, the MPRIS integration. The fact that it integrates with GNOME in a very stylish way (timers can be previewed in GNOME's notification/calendar area) is also a plus.

The app's main GUI is very simple. It's a small window that allows you to start a custom timer, or choose from a couple of user-defined timers. The fact that this app uses MPRIS technology and manages to be this customizable is quite remarkable. I have to admit, I did not expect it to have this many customization options on tap.

Users have control over aspects such as the notifications, the default timer, the default text (description) for said timers, progress color, and a few GUI customization options (enable or disable the timer preset menu, the default preset, etc.).

Last but not least, I also like the fact that the app is very keyboard-friendly. Users can use the navigation keys (arrows, Tab button, Shift + Space, and Enter) to enter numbers for a custom timer, or choose one of the default/user-defined timers from the list.

Even though the overall experience is a positive one (at least in my opinion), there are a couple of things that "bug" me. The first one is that once a timer has started, the main GUI instantly disappears. This is neither good nor bad, but if you want to start 3 timers, you'll have to open the app 3 times which can become annoying.

The second thing that I found a bit awkward was the Settings menu, the place from where you can customize the timers. I'm not a big fan of the GUI in this section because it involves a lot of scrolling to customize timers. Once again, if you're the type of user who only requires one-timer, that's fine. However, if you want to start multiple custom timers, you have to scroll down and up multiple times to select all the appropriate settings.

I like Play Timer's fresh approach to creating a GNOME timer app. I also like the fact that the app has a nice native feel to it and you can operate it via the keyboard. There are a few "kinks" that might require some ironing out, but as a whole, I think it's a very interesting app that's worth checking out.