Shortening the post - it's late and I'm tired - I've played with Gambas2 and its wonderful IDE in order to get in touch with Desktop development, one of those things I've always missed as a programmer.
So, in order to solve a dilemma I've always had with my ubuntu, I started - and finished - to develop a small applet based on the Pomodoro Tecnique.
The whole code is on GitHub.
How does it work?
You can start a 25 minutes pomodoro, which will play a click/clock ring for its entire duration.
In addition, in the last minute, a bell every 15 seconds will notice the upcoming end of the pomodoro.
After the 25 minutes the applet will "launch" a five minutes pause:
which will terminate asking you wheter to start another pomodoro or not.
Available packages
Packages are available for:
and I also provide an executable, for those who already have the Gambas interpreter and don't want to install the whole package.
For Ubuntuers: the applet will be accessible from Applications > Office