Stopwatch "Lap" function: um...what?

On a "normal" stopwatch pushing the LAP button gives the individual lap time and the STOP button the total time.

As an example, given a 4 lap race you would want something like this;

START
LAP >> 1.35
LAP >> 1.42
LAP >> 1.38
STOP >> 4.15

If you didn't care about the total time you would push LAP after the 4th lap instead of STOP;

START
LAP >> 1.35
LAP >> 1.42
LAP >> 1.38
LAP >> 1.42

I have no idea what the Apple geeks were thinking on this one.

William.

It seems someone who programed the stopwatch made a mistake or is unclear on the concept of "lap"

This has already been noted as not a "bug" but a completely mis-programmed piece of functionality of the iPhone. Apparently, Apple doesn't think it's a big deal since they haven't fixed it, or not very many people use the stopwatch and hence have not sent their feedback.

By the way, the feedback form is pretty much a waste of your time. It won't get fixed until Steve takes his daughter to a swim meet and decides to clock her himself.

a) they rarely, if ever, respond to the feedback
b) you can wait for eons before you see your feedback question addressed, and probably because a task team at apple finally comes across the bug.

Well, regardless of how the stopwatch works, at this point it is still 'bugged'...

See this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4899564&#4899564

If you'd like for it to operate differently than it does now, submit a suggestion here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Actually, I like this implementation. Yes, you need to total the laps to get total time. But done the other way, I have to subtract from lap to lap to get the lap time. A most of my timing (distribution systems automation) is in situations where the "lap" times matter, but total time does not.

Now on my PDA, each "lap line" displays both lap time and cumulative tiem on each line. It looks like the iPhone has room to do that on the screen without making the fonts to small to read.

Yeah, JustJ, William said it right. If you don't care about the total time, then don't ever hit stop. That's not to say that even though traditional, handheld stopwatches have been used for many, many years for sporting events and the like that they can't be improved, but if you're timing a 40 lap car race for instance, you don't want to be adding up lap times to determine the total time, or when the race is done and the driver asks what their time was you have to say "wait, let me add all forty laps together using base-60 mathematics." All Apple has to do is add a second timer at the top; there's plenty of room: one for the overall time and one for the lap time. Done.

It was just thrown on the device without much thought.

I am starting to think apple would have been better off had they just simply not put any features into this thing at all. Just a keypad.. no contacts, no ipod, no speaker phone.. **** even the ringer is a problem 😝..

::sigh:: I guess it is true though, people who are content with someone never tell anyone, people who find fault with it will shout it from the roof tops.

Well, they're ****** if they do and ****** if they don't. The clamor for the phone was reaching epic proportions, so they kind of had to release the phones "as is", so certain functionality was left out, some of it head-scratching some of it not, but what they did brilliantly was make it unbelievably easy to send updates.

On the other hand, they make it unbelievably frustrating by not announcing what bugfixes and functionality changes they plan to do, let alone WHEN they plan to do them, so the longer it takes for them to update a "non stopwatch" for instance, the more glaring the other omissions become.

Their marketing should be pumping it up before people become bored with the concept of buying one, or buy something else instead. For instance, I know a BUNCH of guys that aren't going to get it because they primarily would be buying it to check their fantasy football, which requires Flash, but they don't know whether it'll ever be supported so they haven't. So when it DOES support Flash, the idea of buying an iPhone will either be passe, or there will be other phones already with that option, so they'll choose that one instead.

I don't care about Apple's financial bottom line, it's just that current iPhone users should want as many other people to own one as possible so the demand for new features multiplies.

::sigh:: I guess it is true though, people who are content with someone never tell anyone, people who find fault with it will shout it from the roof tops.

Other smartphones have well known quirks as well. The huge difference is, third parties are able to take up the slack on those other devices. If something is missing or wrong, somebody usually makes a replacement or enhancement.

iPhone users don't officially have that luxury. I think that makes the yelling a bit more, umm, what's the right word? Unstoppable?

We now return to those who'll claim everyone should've known the stopwatch was messed up before they bought it.

MobileDev wrote:

The huge difference is, third parties are able to take up the slack on those other devices. If something is missing or wrong, somebody usually makes a replacement or enhancement.

Which is good and bad because in many cases, a third party would release a "good enough" hack that'll keep the users from complaining too loudly, and seeing that the first party is less inclined to provide a real "clean" solution to the problem.

Apple can be slow to add or fix things, if they ever get around to it, but if/when they do, you can bet your money it's going to be the most elegant of solutions. Here's hoping that they'll do the same with this stop watch thing ;p