Countdown Timers! Three of them. If you go to the settings screen (tap the sprocket from the root view in the Workout tab), you can set the duration for each independently and also set them to automatically start when you enter a set. (See the right image above.)
The time is in seconds, obviously. ‘ON’ means the timer will start counting down when you enter a set. Whether a timer is set to ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’ you can also get it started by tapping it in the input screen (See the left image above). Tap the timer again to stop and reset it.
If sound is on, the timer will begin beeping with 3 seconds remaining, and of course it buzzes with or without sound. Each timer has its own unique alarm sound. I tried to make them as unannoying as possible because you’ll probably hear them a lot.
The bad news is that when you put your device to sleep, the timers will stop running after about 20 seconds. This is a consequence of the way the iPhone operating system works, and is being treated as a bug by the developers, so hopefully Apple will address it at some point. There are ways around it that wear down your battery and are frowned upon by Apple -- and they may reject it -- but I will look into these and maybe add them to the next release. (I could make it so that your device never sleeps automatically, but you can just as easily change the auto-lock time in the Settings app, and that won’t help you anyway if you put it to sleep manually.) All other apps with timers that I have seen, have the same flaw.
The good news is that if you have music playing (and who doesn’t?), the CPU remains active when you put your device to sleep, and the timers will work correctly. So my advice at this point is to check out some cool music. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this will all get sorted out soon, I’m sure.
If you don’t want to listen to music, I’ve created an hour long mp3 of silence that you can play instead. Very cool.
