Lickety Split vs Eureka! Timer

Lickety Split is a visual and musical timer for kids that turns everyday routines into a game. Each task has its own classical music, which plays for as long as the task should take and speeds up as time runs out, while an animated character acts out the task and a Time Disc drains. WHY IT WORKS "We need to leave in five minutes." That rarely works with a young child: research shows the prefrontal cortex, which handles focus, self-regulation and executive function, is among the last parts of the brain to mature. Music is a way in. A child follows a song long before they can read a clock, so Lickety Split puts the time left into the music. Five minutes becomes something a child can see and hear, and grown-ups get to cheer instead of nag. TWO KINDS OF TIMER 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: keep going until the music ends. - Brushing teeth (a full two minutes) - Taking turns - Reading time - Study time Anything Timer: a song of about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 or 20 minutes for anything else. Your Song, Your Length: time any task with a song from your own music. Its length becomes the timer. MAKE IT YOUR FAMILY'S - Your own tasks: "Shoes on" or "Feed the cat", in your words, with a picture, of the length you choose - Your own prompts: record what the timer says before the song, in your voice - Your own songs: give any task a song of yours, or one of the app's 15 recordings - Routines: put tasks in order for the morning or bedtime. A Now and Next card shows what is happening now and what comes next, in the tasks' pictures, like a picture schedule - Children & profiles: up to six children on one device, each with their own character, routines and progress. No accounts MY DAY The win is the child’s own: they beat the music and tap “I Did It!” themselves. Today, a calendar and a Storybook bring routines and plans together. Plan school mornings, change a single day, and look back together in the evening. A family can choose something to try, like patience, and keep a few words, a drawing or a short voice story. Trying counts, on hard days too, with no points or streaks to keep up. CHARACTERS Timey the hourglass is free, with 25 rewards. Premium adds a train, a unicorn, a bee, a caterpillar and the dinosaurs, each with short animated stories for both timers, and Music Practice with Beaty: play, sing or clap, and Beaty listens and dances along (needs a microphone; nothing is recorded). Premium is an optional subscription, $2.99 a year in the US, behind a grown-up question. MADE FOR SMALL HANDS - A narrator says each task out loud, so a child who can't read yet can use it - Tap the timer to pause, resume, start over or go home - Settings hide the Time Disc or the numbers, skip the story intro or voice prompts, and choose what happens when the duck wins - Changing a timer, opening a link or buying anything asks a grown-up question first - Works with VoiceOver, Voice Control and Reduce Motion WHO USES IT Parents, for morning, bedtime and homework routines. Preschool teachers, for transitions and tidy-up time. Occupational therapists, for everyday skills. Visual timers are a familiar tool for children with autism or ADHD, and in small studies a visible timer lowered children's anxiety and inattention during timed tasks. Lickety Split is for all children. Spoken prompts in 21 languages, from English and Spanish to Japanese, Hindi and Arabic. No ads, no tracking and no accounts. Nothing your family makes is sent to us. Timers, music and characters work offline; the app goes online only for purchases, crash reports and optional iCloud. Made by parents and educational technologists, helping families since 2011. Terms of Use: 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.