I’ve made tons of progress with the iPhone app I’ve been working on. Tentatively the name’s going to be WeiWatch, and no I’m not trying to be egotistical, just thought it was catchy. Comments are more than welcome. You can use WeiWatch to time how long you take to do really routine things like your morning commute, or how long you take to shower. Wouldn’t it be really useful to know what your average time is so you can estimate better the next time, maybe avoid being late again?
There’s more to the App including a cute stopwatch minigame I created as well as prompts comparing your newest timing to the average. I’ll be writing more about that soon. Also, I plan to use Apple’s ad-hoc distribution to let some kind folks test it. Let me know if you have an iPhone/iPod touch and are interested in helping me try it out.
Meanwhile, here’s a screenshot of the first screen you see when you open the app:
I like what you’ve done with it so far! For a beta run, most of the things you need are in place, and it’s pretty intuitive. I definitely will be using this a lot when I try to time my grad school exams.
Regarding fitting more text or instructions for the minigame, I wonder if you could sacrifice the size of the timer numbers for some more real estate? You’d be giving up the minimalist aesthetic, which is very attractive.
If you wanted to make this more complicated, you could add tags to specific things. Morning commutes could have “with traffic”, “no traffic”, “all green lights”, and then a predict function, for an average commute with–. Just a thought as something to rationalize the outliers when calculating time.
Thanks for the feedback Serena! Timing grad school exams! It’s cool how people are telling me how they’re going to use it to time all these different things I’d never have thought of.
Cool predict idea. And yeah I’m definitely thinking of incorporating the minigame instructions other than just showing it to people the first time.