Long ago, the App Store was new. It was 2008 and I taught myself Objective-C out of a book for Mac developers. I NEEDED to build iPhone apps, and nothing else existed to explain the process. Of my early indie apps, only one truly stuck. People fell in love with Tallymander. I heard from research scientists, draftsman, drywall installers, even collectible card game enthusiasts. Giving them an easy way to keep track of data with their phones solved real problems I hadn't expected. After Tallymander was featured on the front page of the App Store, a raft of clones followed. It was incredible to invent something people found so useful. Eventually, I was sucked up by Silicon Valley's ravenous appetite for iOS work. I didn't have time to maintain my indie apps. No one minded too much—except for my Tallymander customers, who emailed me for months. In the decade since, I've thought about Tallymander constantly. After being laid off in March, I decided it was time to bring it back. I spent the last five weeks building Tallymander from scratch, using SwiftUI. Tallymander lets you count things and solve math problems on your iPhone. You can set up complex equations to make sense of your data. Like a spreadsheet, the results update instantly as the inputs change. Unlike a spreadsheet, Tallymander is comfortable to use on a small screen, on the go. Data export is important—Tallymander supports both text summaries and CSV. But even better, any Tallymander Workspace you create can be texted, emailed or Airdropped to a friend. That makes it easy to share your creations for team activities. I'm so excited to have this back in the world, and to hear more unexpected tales of how Tallymander was put to use. Thanks so much for giving it a look. Let me know what you think, and what you wish Tallymander would add to its feature set next!

Tallymander

Collect and analyze data anywhere, with your iPhone

Collect and analyze data anywhere, with your iPhone