Lickety Split vs Eureka! Timer

"We need to leave the house in five minutes." "Brush your teeth for two whole minutes." "For the umpteenth time, please pick up your toys." Sound familiar? Telling a young child they have five minutes rarely works: five minutes feels different every time. So we made it a game. Lickety Split is the visual musical timer that turns daily tasks into a beat-the-clock adventure, so parents can be their child's champion instead of their task-master. Choose a task and start the timer. Classical music plays for exactly as long as the task should take, gently and then excitedly speeding up, while an animated character acts out the task and a Time Disc drains as time runs out. Kids feel the urgency without the pressure. When they beat the timer, everyone celebrates. Two kinds of timers: Beat the Timer: finish before the music runs out. - Ready to leave the house (5 minutes) - Getting dressed - PJs on - Getting ready for a meal - Cleaning up the room - Making the bed Count Down: turn waiting into a calm, visible experience. - Brushing teeth (a full two minutes) - Taking turns - Study time - Reading time Anything Timer: choose 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 or 20 minutes, each with its own perfectly matched song. Great for any new task, or for "Watch the timer and then we'll play together." Your Song, Your Length: time any task with a song from your own music. Timey the hourglass is free, with 18 different rewards. Premium adds four more characters, a train, a unicorn, a bee and a caterpillar, each with its own short animated stories for both kinds of timer. Premium is an optional yearly subscription ($1.99 a year in the US), behind a grown-up question. Made for small hands and busy grown-ups: - Tap the timer to pause; resume, start over or go home - Settings to hide the Time Disc or the numbers, skip the story intro or voice prompts, and choose what happens when time runs out - Anything that changes how a timer works, opens a link or involves a purchase asks a grown-up question first Why it works: For young children, time is an abstract idea that only makes sense when it is attached to something they can see and hear. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for focus, self-regulation and executive function, is among the last parts of the brain to mature. Lickety Split meets children where they are: the accelerating music, the animation and the Time Disc act as a gentle scaffold for attention and transitions, helping children build a real sense of time at their own pace. Especially loved by parents of children with ADHD, autism and sensory processing differences, for whom visual timers and clear sound cues can make an enormous difference with time blindness and transitions. It was designed for all children, and works beautifully for every family. Used and loved by: - Families building morning routines, bedtime routines and homework habits - Early childhood educators managing classroom transitions - Occupational therapists supporting children's daily living skills Available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Timers and music work fully offline. No ads, no tracking and no personal information collected: the app goes online only to verify purchases and send anonymous crash reports. Developed by parents and educational technologists, Lickety Split has been helping families raise confident, independent children since 2011. We hope it brings a little more calm, and a lot more cheering, to your family's day. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://www.swirlystudios.com/privacy

Eureka! Timer is a visual countdown timer for parents and teachers. Instead of numbers ticking down, a hidden picture uncovers itself as the time runs out. It finishes exactly when the timer does. Two minutes for toothbrushing, ten for cleaning a bedroom, five for a timeout, or the "thirty more seconds" that never actually means thirty seconds. Your kid watches the picture. You get the two minutes. WHAT IT'S FOR Mostly the daily friction. Brushing teeth, getting dressed, chores, cleaning up, screen time that has to end, and bedtime routines that stall halfway through. It's good for the short stuff a kitchen timer is clumsy for, too: handwashing, potty training, taking turns with a sibling, or the transition warning before you're standing at the door holding their coat. Teachers can use it in classrooms for the same reason parents can use it at home. A child who can't read a clock yet can still see how much is left. So can one who has no real sense of how long "five more minutes" is. It's the same idea as a sand timer, except the sand is a photograph of a penguin! HOW IT WORKS Pick how long, anywhere from fifteen seconds to an hour. Pick a picture. Then pick how it gets uncovered: puzzle pieces landing one at a time, paint splattering across the screen, a curtain pulling back, a blurry photo sharpening into focus, a clock-hand wipe, and five more. The countdown itself can be a ring around the edge of the screen, big digits in the corner, a little analog clock, or outlined numbers sitting over the photo. Or nothing at all, if the number is the part your kid fixates on. Six countdown looks, ten reveal styles, forty-eight built-in photos, three ticking sounds, three finish sounds and three celebrations. That's 77,760 combinations before you add a single picture of your own. If all that sounds like too much, just pick the time and hit "Surprise Me" and the rest will be picked at random. SAVE YOUR ROUTINES Save a setup once, as a named preset: duration, picture and reveal style remembered together. Teeth in the morning, cleanup after dinner, a timeout before it happens again. Tap it on the home screen and it starts. Works on phone and tablet, in English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Turn on notifications and you'll get an alert if the timer finishes while you've switched to another app. THE PICTURES Forty-eight photos come with the app: animals, space, vehicles, toys and sports. All of them real photography, freely licensed or from public archives. You can use your own, too. The dog, grandma, the birthday party they're counting down to. Import as many as you want, crop them so they look right in portrait and landscape, and favorite the ones your kid asks for most so the app can pick one at random. Surprise them with their favorite picture, or let them pick. WHAT'S NOT IN IT No in-app purchases. Not a trial, not a paid tier, nothing locked. No full screen ads. There's one banner ad, on the home screen only. It never shows during a timer, and never on the finished picture. You can turn it off in settings for free, and it stays off. No account, no login, nothing to sign up for. No internet required. It works completely offline. No analytics and no tracking. Nothing about how you use the app goes anywhere, because there's nowhere for it to go. Your settings and your photos stay on your phone. No AI art. All forty-eight built-in photos are real photographs, and that won't change. It's a timer. It doesn't hand out points, it doesn't keep a streak, and it won't ask your kid to come back tomorrow.