Deadliner

In a world filled to the brim with distractions ready to devour your time and energy, the human mind encounters new obstacles daily in its quest for maximum productivity. Whether a video game icon is begging you to double-click it, a social media website tries to capture you in its never-ending rabbit hole, or an eye-catching wallpaper lures you into daydreaming, working in the digital world is getting increasingly tougher.

However, among a sea of applications claiming to let the user maintain focus on what matters for long periods of time, Deadliner stands out as an open-source countdown-based app for helping its user concentrate on a critical project or stay aware of loved ones’ birthdays.

When launching the app, the user is greeted by a dark themed, sleek interface with the most important settings listed in two categories and a tray icon through which the program can be stopped or its main window brought up. In the first settings category, a decent amount of customization is available, with the program allowing for choosing a solid color as a background, an image placed on the local disk or a picture extracted from a URL.

The wallpaper can then be centered, stretched, cropped to fit or made to span across multiple monitors. The time format can include hours, days, weeks or months. Choosing the font is as simple as clicking the drop-down menu that lets the user choose their preferred font and its size and color, based on either a variation of the already-provided Poppins font or a custom one from a folder of their choice.

The deadline then has to be filled in manually in a predetermined format, starting with the year, the month and day, separated by hyphens. Once saved, the text of the deadline is then placed right in the center of the screen, in front of the chosen wallpaper.

This layout is then continued on a second display, if available, where the user can keep an eye out on the deadline itself, or get a refresher whenever navigating to the desktop. One limitation is that, once the app is activated and then closed, the wallpaper does not return to its original state, leaving the user to re-enable it from the Windows Settings app.

At the same time, the app automatically enables itself to start on boot and has to be manually disabled from the Startup tab in Task Manager.

If you are looking for an open-source, privacy-friendly and free application to give you a helping hand in keeping you focused on important tasks and finishing them on time, Deadliner may be the right fit for you.