I needed an excuse to try Mike's Vala bindings for Xfce, so I created a new little plugin for the panel, the xfce4-stopwatch-plugin.
In the original release announcement on July 28th, I wrote:
This is the first release of the stopwatch panel plugin, which you can use to time yourself on different tasks. It's stable and usable, but quite minimal still.
The functionality is best summarized with this image from the web site:
