The toolbar badge
The badge is the only part of Latr on screen when nothing of Latr is open. It shows either a count or a countdown — pick whichever question you actually ask.
The two modes
Settings → Appearance → badge.
| Mode | Shows | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Count | How many reminders are pending, capped at 99+ | "How much have I got stacked up?" |
| Countdown | Time until the next one — 12m, 5h, 3d | "How long have I got?" |
| Off | Nothing | Neither, thanks |
The cap is real rather than cosmetic: a browser toolbar badge fits about two characters,
and four get squeezed into an unreadable smudge. 99+ is the honest version
of "more than you want to think about right now".
When nothing is pending
By default the badge disappears rather than showing 0. There is a setting
for the other behaviour, because the two are genuinely different preferences: an empty
badge is quiet, and a visible zero is a small piece of evidence that Latr is running and
has simply got nothing for you.
How current it is
The countdown redraws when the text would actually change, not on a timer. A reminder
thirty days out does not need the badge recalculating every minute, so Latr works out
when 30d would become 29d and wakes up then.
The one direction a countdown must never err is by overstating the time left, so this is scheduled to be exact at each change rather than approximated at a coarse interval.
If the icon looks grey
Chrome desaturates an extension's toolbar icon to mean "this extension cannot act on this page". Latr's icon is a coloured tile precisely so the difference is visible.
Seeing it grey on an internal browser page (chrome://, the extensions page,
the new-tab page) is normal — extensions are not permitted to act there. It should be
coloured on ordinary web pages. If it looks grey everywhere, check the extension is
enabled at chrome://extensions.
Related: install and pin, and my reminder did not fire if the badge shows a countdown that never arrives.
Something unclear, or something Latr does that this page does not cover? Tell us — the page is easier to fix than the confusion it causes.