I am very pleased to announce that TapWatch, my simple and beautiful stopwatch app for iOS, is now available! View it in the App Store here or check it out in all its minimal glory:

Not that long ago, I needed to time something. Having my iPhone handy, I figured it would be the work of a moment to find a simple stopwatch app and get on with things. I had wanted but three things in my stopwatch:

• No buttons
• Aesthetically pleasing design
• A log of recent times

Half an hour later, I emerged from the morass of the stopwatch apps in the App Store without having found anything that even satisfied two out of three (including the stopwatch mode in the built-in Clock app).

Clearly developing a stopwatch is something people do as a learning exercise, and then forget about. But simply because a niche is unprofitable does not mean that it should not have at least one beautiful option. So I decided to write my own stopwatch, and thus TapWatch was born.

TapWatch offers the following niceties:

• Tap anywhere to start and stop the timer: no more hovering your finger over small buttons!
• Double tap anywhere while a timer is running to start a new lap: you won’t lose any time, because TapWatch notices the timestamp from your first tap, and picks things up from there on the second
• Slide left to view your 50 most recent times (automatically saved!)
• The screen will stay awake as long as TapWatch is active and a timer is running, so feel free to watch what you’re timing
• Multitask: exit TapWatch while a timer is running with impunity; even if iOS quits it in the background it will continue timing
• Scales beautifully when timing things that last anywhere from tenths of a second to hours

If you ever need to time anything, I hope you will give TapWatch a try! I would also love to hear from you if you think the app needs improvement; my personal uses for stopwatches are pretty basic, so I would particularly love to hear how people who need to time things often like the app (coaches, teachers, etc.).