Splicetoday

Digital
Aug 18, 2008, 11:26AM

iPhone Replacing More Than Just Phones

It was so hip of Apple to open up the iPhone for application development. Now the magic little computer with touch screen can be exploited for all sorts of purposes, like helping you to efficiently keep track of your stitches as you work on that new hat.

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Yesterday I was looking through free applications for the iPhone and came across something called StitchMinder, it had a pictures of a ball of yarn in the little button and I did a little dance for the intersection of knitting and technology.

Doing a hat with four sets of decreases? Label all the sections Decrease Row and tap after each decrease. You'll be able to see how many you've done. Set all the sections to count in descending order, and set the start number to the number you need to do, then tap away as you knit and you'll be counting down instead of up, which can be handy to see how much you have left (or simply for motivation). For each counting area you can choose a label - Rows Completed, Pattern Row, Pattern Repeats, Increase Row, Increase Repeat, Decrease Row, Decrease Repeat - so you can keep track of different areas of the pattern on the same screen. You don't lose your numbers if you close the application, turn off the phone or set it to sleep mode.

Discussion
  • I am, admittedly, an iPhone owner, but shouldn't we know some things by rote? I know f-stops and crystal sync speeds by heart the same way that a carpenter knows dimensional lumber measurements and a knitter should know their stitching counts (or whatever they call it). These are things that should be learned by experience and training, not recited by a box because you never took the time to learn. It's great to have something that can tell me if it's going to rain when I'm on my way to the park, but at what point does it start to replace the functions of my brain and I turn into a character from "Idiocracy"?

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