Hands up if you like counting things. Keep still while I count you all. Wait – arg. This isn’t working. How can I keep count? Maybe Tallywag will help me.
Tallywag is a counting machine for iOS, designed to help you count and keep track of things over time. You can set up 50 groups of related items, and four counters within each group. So if counting’s your thing, this is the app you need.
Here’s a promo vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FsIHaN5jlfc
Functionally, Tallywag works great. I mean, it’d be hard to go wrong with counting, right? But yeah, as far as counting goes, everything’s fine. What’s nice is the added graph view – spin your device sideways and you see your counts displayed in three different graphic views: bar chart, pie chart and line graph.
The longer you spend counting stuff, the more useful these charts become. It’s possible to select a particular date range if you want the charts to zoom in on some detail. Each chart is sharable by email, Facebook or Twitter. They can be saved as images to the Camera Roll too.
So yeah. Functionally? Great. But is it actually that useful? I think it is, but you might need to apply your mind a little. I did. For quite a while, I simply couldn’t think of any things I needed to count. Turns out, I don’t spend my life counting much stuff. But it’s important to remember that Tallywag doesn’t just count, it counts over time. So you can use it to monitor reoccurring events and the dates they occur on – even if you’re not interested in how many of them there are, but simply when and how often they happen.
The people behind the app suggest that it might open new counting-related doors for you. That you might start keeping count of certain things in your life that you may not have bothered to count before, simply because you now have a convenient way of doing it.
After a bit of thought, I was able to come up with some things worth counting. How often I exercise, and how often my home wifi goes offline (Almost. Every. Day.), and so on. Things that I was counting before, but not always very effectively or efficiently.
Tallywag is an odd little thing. It’s good at what it does (which, for a dollar, makes it good value for money), but you might find yourself wondering what you might ever use it for.
Pro: Counts like a pro.
Con: Pro-level counting is an acquired taste.
