Lightning talks is a new fast way to give a presentation in a limited time. This way you can give a presentation very quickly under 5 or 10 minutes and then others can do the same. Lightning talks are very efficient at saving the time and focusing on the very important information only.
When you are giving lightning talks presentation over Skype or Zoom, you can use an open-source timer called Lightning Talks Countdown Timer to keep you informed about the time. This small timer is a portable application and does not require any installation. You can carry it with you in a memory card or a USB flash drive and use it on any Windows PC. It is also available for macOS but requires Mono to be installed.
As we launch it, it displays a small timer window on your desktop screen. We can drag this tiny timer anywhere on the screen where we find it convenient. We can right-click on this timer to set the countdown from anywhere between 1 minute to 90 minutes. Typical lightning talks are of 5 minutes to it is set to 5 minutes by default. We have the options to black out the entire computer screen when timer is stopped. We can also toggle starting or stopping of the timer when clicking on the timer window itself.
So what happens when the timer is stopped? By default, it is set to cover up the entire screen and turn it all black. When this happens, it shows Time Up on in white color and black background on the full screen. Nothing can be more clear than this when you are busy giving a presentation online. This is an indication for you to finish up the presentation and stop.
Even though Lightning Talks Countdown Timer is mainly designed for the people who give presentations over Skype or Zoom, you can use the same time for other things. For example, we can finish writing a blog post in under 30 minutes through the use of this timer. Racing against the time really encourages us to finish faster.
You can download Lightning Talks Countdown Timer from https://github.com/jsakamoto/Lightning-Talks-Countdown-Timer.