Until reading the docs for SD8 I had no idea the timer in the tool bar was a button. It is not obvious. People who read documentation would discover this is a button, but most people skip that and just skim the docs when they run into a problem.
It might be worth it to think if there is a way for that to be more obvious. Possibly something like a button that when clicked switches the display and is called a switch. Or the title underneath it says “timer/time broken down,” or something like that. Something that indicates it does 2 different things.
An idea on this one: I’ve seen some apps with info areas in the tool bar like this use a little stepper at the right end of the info to show that it has options you can, well, step through. Even with only two options, it still makes some sense.
Now… that said… I thought iTunes used to have it but the new “Music” app doesn’t seem to have it and I can’t easily check back to older version. I thought the same for Xcode, and a couple of other apps that also don’t have it any more, if they ever did. So now I’m a little confused as I can’t seem to find any current apps that have it. Maybe Apple’s moving away from this with Big Sur, and therefore maybe we don’t want to do this idea.
But then the question is: what to do instead? My opinion, for what it’s worth, is I’d really like to see ScriptDebugger honor Big Sur’s (and future macOS’s) design principles, so I’d be interested to see what anyone else thinks might be a suitable UI for this (well, if Mark thinks it’s a good idea in the first place).