![]() | Cuppa |
Cuppa is a small application for Mac OS X to time your cup of tea as it steeps. Tired of leaving your tea too long, to become bitter and cold, or drinking it too soon and not appreciating its full potential? Then this utility is for you!
Use it from the Dock: just right-click or control-click on Cuppa's icon and select the beverage you are brewing. Or select a beverage from the Beverages menu. Cuppa will begin timing the brew, and you'll see a teabag appear in the cup and gradually darken as the tea steeps. When the tea is done Cuppa will attempt to get your attention by various configurable means. You can also enable a countdown timer that's displayed in a small badge on the Dock icon.
Tea is a personal thing, but Cuppa can be customized to your heart's content. To do so, select Preferences... from the menu.
Beverage List: The Beverage List tab allows you to change any existing tea by double-clicking on its name or steep time and simply typing in a new value. You can also remove beverages entirely, or add new ones, by clicking the buttons underneath the beverage listing.
Clicking the Options tab will open a page of additional configuration settings:
What if you need to brew a cup of tea in a hurry, and don't have time to add a new beverage in Preferences? No worries; Cuppa's Quick Timer feature is a simple way to start a timer in a jiffy. Just select Quick Timer... from the menu and type either a number of seconds (e.g. "30"), minutes and seconds (e.g. "2:45"), or any time up to the maximum 10 hours. Cuppa does the rest, and notifies you when time is up.
To cancel the timer while it is running, select Cancel from the menu.
You may find it amusing if your computer announces, "Tea -- Earl Grey -- Hot" when your morning tea is ready to drink. Although there is no mechanism within Cuppa's Preferences for changing the alert sounds, it's actually quite easy to accomplish this. You'll need a couple of AIFF format sound files to copy into the Cuppa application bundle. These will replace the default sounds for beginning and completing brewing. Name them pour.aiff and spoon.aiff, respectively.
Then, replace the default sound files as follows:
Cuppa is an free, open-source application.
Copyright © 2005-2013 Nathan Cosgray, with contributions from Mathias Meyer and Eric McMurry. German translation by Benedikt Hopmann. Czech translation by Tomáš. Italian translation by Giuseppe Morelli. French translation by Christian Parent.
This application was inspired by The Tea Cooker for Linux and is based on work done by Wunderbear Software.
Visit the Cuppa home page at http://www.nathanatos.com/software/.
Also available: iCuppa for iPhone and iPod touch... you'll find it in the iTunes App Store! ...and aCuppa for Android in the Google Play Store!