Wednesday, November 03, 2010

row counter

shawl counting
Readers of this blog probably already realise I'm a bit of a nerd, but you may or may not realise the full extent of this nerdery. I'm actually a software developer by trade. Hey, where are you going? Wait... there's some free stuff further down!

So lately, I treated myself to an Android phone, and have been having lots of fun playing round with it. I am the sort of person who constantly loses her place in charts, as I am quite often doing something else distracting while I knit, like watching telly or thinking about what to have for tea. So I really wanted a nice idiotproof row counter app, and there weren't any free ones that did what I wanted. I just wanted something mega simple where you touch the screen and it counts. I did find one, but it didn't stop the phone from going to sleep. This is a bit of a pain if you're knitting long rows and have to keep turning your phone back on again whilst holding more needles than a porcupine. So I wrote my own app, really simple with a nice big number, which stays awake, eagerly awaiting your tappings. You can set a pattern repeat if you like, too. I've found this quite useful for the shawl I'm currently working on. It's Aestlight, and there is a 16 row repeating pattern all along the border. Amazingly, there have been no froggings / tinkings to date. This is nothing short of a miracle, based on previous encounters between rubbishneedles and lace patterns.

Anyway, County from BobbinsSoft is now up on the Android Marketplace for free download, if anyone else is interested. Hope it is of some use to other lovely knitterfolk!

If you have an Android phone handy and want a go, you can take a picture of the QR code below and send it to Google Goggles, and it will find the app for you. (Or just search for BobbinsSoft in the market.)

County qr code

7 comments:

Two Cables and a Frapp said...

Wow ! I am impressed ! See, I would not call someone like you a geek. I would say that you are a very-creative-problem-solver. Oh I can do a chart alright but like you, I am terrible at keeping track.

Anonymous said...

Oh my goodness you have no idea how many times I've fruitlessly searched Android Market for a row counter!

Long live geekery, I'm off to go download it and write rave reviews.

Penny said...

Oh good thinking! Sadly my phone isn't sophisticated enough for such a thing, but if I do upgrade, I'll totally remember this!

cyclingsteph said...

Downloaded and installed. Looks good on a tryout. Will be ages before I get to use it for real though, got to finish flat and bike hunting first.

rubbishknitter said...

hooray! so glad I can use my powers of coding to help knitterfriends rather than just The Man...

Anonymous said...

I've downloaded it. Thanks :)

Peggy said...

While searching for.. you guest it.. android row counters... I am getting yours now! :D lol As.. I usually use the |||| \ in sets of 5 to count on paper, and than loose the paper.. and than what do you do?!?! Lol