There’s few apps that get me excited these days. But when I saw the Countdown Widget Maker, I knew I got to have it. It’s an app that allows you to create custom widgets on iOS 14, so that you can see the countdown right on your phone screen.

You see, I used to enjoy using this site called countdown.xyz, which had since been shut down. It allows you to create a countdown event page on the browser, upload a beautiful image for background, and comes with a unique URL to share around. I loved using it for all my trips and big life events. Being able to see the countdown regularly and look forward in anticipation to those events made life just feel so much brighter, so much more hope. I really missed doing that, especially since the pandemic started. With the travel lockdown and restrictions around gatherings, there were no more countdowns to look forward to, no sense of anticipation to anything, and the future didn’t look so optimistic anymore.

But with things looking better now in Singapore, cases dwindling down to pre-lockdown times, and the economy and travel bubbles slowly opening up, and legit rumours of a vaccine by early 2021, there’s now good reasons to look up. To daydream again. To feel hopeful again. Seriously, the timing of discovering this countdown widget couldn’t be more timely! 

Countdowns as an anticipation mechanism, a wellspring of hope and optimism.