Foto Timer for Palm OS: A Photography Interval Timer for Palm Handhelds



During the Palm OS era, PalmGear catalogued thousands of third-party applications that turned a pocket organizer into a purpose-built tool — and Foto Timer was one of the more unusual entries. It was not a photo viewer or a camera remote; it was a programmable interval timer, written by German developer Jan Exner, that photographers used to time things a camera's own shutter couldn't: long-exposure astronomical photographs, darkroom film-development stages, and enlarger exposures.

PalmGear listed Foto Timer under product ID 9302, at the historical URL http://palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?sid=54905620021122082656&prodID=9302. That listing is long gone, but its trail survives in a December 2002 "Computers in Astronomy" newsletter column by Don Shedrick, which linked directly to the PalmGear product page while describing the software in a single sentence: "Foto Timer is an interval timer." The column recommended it specifically for timing long-exposure photographs of celestial objects and for darkroom film and print development. This restored page documents what Foto Timer actually was, based on the developer's own surviving site and that contemporary source — this is dead, unsupported software, preserved here for historical reference.

What Was Foto Timer?

Foto Timer was a freeware Palm OS application built around a simple idea: a Palm handheld's processor and speaker could serve as a precise, silent-in-your-pocket, always-with-you replacement for a stopwatch, kitchen timer, or dedicated interval timer. According to developer Jan Exner's own site, the program was originally written because he "no longer wanted to count the seconds" while photographing the stars, and it grew — with feature requests from other users, credited by name on the developer's site — into what he describes as a general-purpose interval timer usable at almost every stage of making a photograph.

The core unit in Foto Timer is the process: a named timing configuration with a total duration, an interval length, and a pause time, which can be assigned to one of 15 categories. Multiple processes could be created, stored, and — from version 2.1 onward — chained together so that one process automatically started the next when it finished. This made Foto Timer suitable not just for a single countdown, but for multi-step sequences such as a full darkroom development chain.

Origins and Version History

Based on the version-history changelog published on the developer's own site, Foto Timer's earliest traceable releases (versions 0.1–0.3) did not yet count or beep at all. The table below summarizes the milestones that are directly documented there.

This history places the timeline of the Shedrick astronomy column in useful context: it was published November 22, 2002, five days after version 2.3 shipped. By that point Foto Timer already had process chaining (added in 2.1), serial-port/enlarger control (added in 1.0), and the red-on-black Night Vision display (added in 2.2) — meaning the version being recommended for astrophotography and darkroom use already had all three of those relevant capabilities. Version 2.4, released in January 2003, appears to have been the final release; the developer's site does not document any later Palm OS version.

Note: No independent release-date confirmation from PalmGear's own listing could be recovered — the historical PalmGear page is no longer accessible and web.archive.org could not be reached during this research — so version dates here rely on the developer's own published changelog rather than PalmGear's catalog record.

Astronomy and Long-Exposure Photography Use

The clearest surviving evidence of Foto Timer's astronomy use is the December 2002 "Computers in Astronomy" column by Don Shedrick, which grouped it alongside other Palm OS astronomy titles (including StarParty, a planetarium program, a Pleiades atlas, a moon-phase calculator, and sunrise/sunset tools) and linked directly to its PalmGear product page. The column's description of Foto Timer was limited to its role as an interval timer for "long-exposure photographs of celestial objects."

Long-exposure astrophotography — capturing faint stars, planets, or deep-sky objects — routinely requires exposures longer than a camera's built-in shutter range, timed manually via a "bulb" setting. A separate, purpose-built timer removes the need to count seconds by hand or rely on a wristwatch in the dark, and Foto Timer's version-2.2 "Night Vision" mode (a red-on-black display, added June 2002) is directly relevant here: red light preserves dark-adapted night vision, a standard practice among visual and photographic astronomers. This documents what the software's design supported; PalmGear's own listing text and any user reviews of the product page could not be recovered, so we cannot confirm how PalmGear itself marketed the astronomy angle beyond what the Shedrick column shows.

Darkroom and Film Development Use

Foto Timer's suitability for darkroom work is documented in more detail than its astronomy use, via a step-by-step example published on the developer's own site, credited to a user named Wei Chong, describing an actual black-and-white film development session using Kodak T-Max 100 film and XTOL developer at a 1:1 dilution and 75°F. The example chained four processes:

Each process could carry a text note (in this case, the developer dilution and temperature), viewable later through Palm's Memo Pad and Palm Desktop applications, per the developer's manual. The example also describes reusing the chain for variant development times (e.g., a "Normal +1" push) by editing individual stages while leaving the chain links intact.

Beyond film development, the changelog shows Foto Timer added a dedicated "enlarger control button" and serial-port device management in version 1.0 (April 2002), letting the handheld drive external hardware — the developer's manual states it "can also drive any electric or electronic device through a switch box," with the darkroom enlarger given as the primary documented example. We could not verify further specifics of how the enlarger-control feature was wired to physical equipment, or whether it supported dimming/timing beyond simple on/off switching.

Features and Timer Modes

Drawing on the developer's own manual (still published at the time of this research), Foto Timer's documented feature set includes:

• Process-based timing: each process stores a total duration, interval length, and pause time, with hh:mm:ss, mm:ss, or seconds-only entry formats.
• Countdown and count-up display: a process could count down to zero or count up from zero, selectable in preferences.
• Chaining ("Auto Goto"): added in version 2.1, this let one process automatically launch the next, with an optional pause between stages, a manual "Next" advance option, and the ability to loop back to the first process in the chain.
• Multiple beep types: an interval-end sound, configurable "prebeep" warnings before an interval ends, a once-per-second metronome sound during counting, and separate sounds for process start/end and chain transitions.
• Night Vision display: a red-on-black screen mode for color Palm OS devices, added in version 2.2, intended to preserve dark adaptation.
• Hardware button control: an option to block the device's physical buttons (described by the developer as useful "if you have your Palm OS device in your shirt pocket"), plus the option to map the Up/Down hardware buttons to Start/Stop.
• Serial-port / external hardware control: introduced in version 1.0, used to drive an enlarger or other switched electrical device.
• Palm OS Categories: added in version 2.2, letting processes be organized the same way Palm's built-in applications organized records.
• Notes and logging: text notes attached to individual processes, and log-file entries for process start/stop events, both readable through Palm's Memo Pad and Palm Desktop.

We found no documentation of a specific maximum single-interval duration (the developer's manual describes time entry formats but does not state a hard ceiling), so we are not stating one. An earlier version's changelog entry (version 2.0) mentions a process list supporting up to 65,535 entries; a separate developer summary elsewhere states storage for "up to 32,767 processes." Both figures come from the developer's own materials, but they don't fully agree with each other, so we present both rather than picking one.

Technical Specifications

We could not verify a specific list of tested or supported Palm handheld models (e.g., specific Palm III, V, Tungsten, or Treo model numbers); the sources describe Palm OS version compatibility rather than named devices, so no device list is claimed here.

The PalmGear Listing and Availability Today

PalmGear's historical listing for Foto Timer, at product ID 9302, is confirmed to have existed through its direct citation in Don Shedrick's December 2002 astronomy column — the link target and product ID are legible in that column's source. That original PalmGear catalog page itself is no longer reachable; this restoration page cannot reproduce PalmGear's own listing copy, screenshots, user ratings, or download counts from that page, because none of it could be retrieved during this research.

Foto Timer for Palm OS remains available today directly from developer Jan Exner's personal website, which still hosts the current version 2.4 alongside every prior release back to 0.7.1, each with its own screenshot. The developer's site also now hosts an open-source Android application also called "Foto Timer," described as based on the old Palm OS program, along with a related "Activity Timer" for Android TV — evidence that the interval-timer concept from the Palm OS original was carried forward, though we found no page explicitly detailing a feature-by-feature comparison between the Palm OS version and its Android namesake.

Why a Palm Handheld Instead of a Wristwatch or Darkroom Clock

For photographers working outdoors at night or in a darkroom, Foto Timer's appeal came from combining several things a plain clock, kitchen timer, or wristwatch didn't: a Palm handheld was already pocket-portable and battery-powered; Foto Timer let a photographer pre-program an entire sequence of exposures or chemical stages rather than watching a single countdown; its audible alerts (interval beeps, prebeeps, and a metronome) meant a photographer didn't have to keep checking a screen in the dark; and — where the Night Vision display and enlarger/serial-port control were used — the software could integrate more directly with the darkroom or astrophotography setup than a generic timer could. Palm's own built-in clock application offered a single alarm, not chainable multi-stage processes, per-process notes, or hardware-triggering, which is presumably why a dedicated third-party timer like Foto Timer found an audience among photographers in the first place — though we found no source stating this comparison explicitly; it follows from the feature gap documented above.

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways

• Foto Timer was a freeware Palm OS interval timer developed by Jan Exner, listed on PalmGear under product ID 9302.
• A December 2002 "Computers in Astronomy" column by Don Shedrick recommended it for timing long-exposure photographs of celestial objects and for darkroom film/print development, linking directly to its PalmGear listing.
• Development ran from at least September 2000 (version 0.4) through January 2003 (version 2.4, the final documented release).
• Process chaining (v2.1, June 2002), serial-port/enlarger hardware control (v1.0, April 2002), and a red-on-black "Night Vision" display (v2.2, June 2002) were all present by the time of the astronomy recommendation.
• A developer-published example documents real-world darkroom use: a four-stage, chained black-and-white film development sequence (developer, stop bath, fixer, wash) using Kodak T-Max 100 and XTOL developer.
• The original PalmGear listing is no longer accessible, but the Palm OS application files remain downloadable from the developer's personal website.