Simple and so very useful

My wife and I had been using an Itzbeen to track our first baby for the first 8 weeks. Being able to quickly monitor the time since the last diaper/feeding/nap has been really valuable, but the problem with the Itzbeen is that its (a) unforgiving if you forget to hit the button, and (b) unable to tell you what happened yesterday -- or even what happened during the period before the time its tracking at a given moment.

Enter Baby Timer. We recently took our son on his first out-of-state trip. (He was an angel on the flight, BTW. Lucky us!) However, we forgot to pack the Itzbeen and wanted some way to keep track of his activities. I grabbed Baby Timer during a late-night feeding session and am really pleased with this application. The two critical features overcome the weaknesses of the Itzbeen. First, it doesnt matter if we dont start the timer at the moment his state changes because although Baby Timer defaults to starting the timer now, it allows me to adjust that time and capture the fact that I should have started the timer 20 minutes ago. Second, Baby Timer keeps a complete (and completely editable) record of events.

My only issue has been the tracking of naps. I like that the app captures changes of state via "Start nap" and "End nap" buttons, but the history listing of naps -- which shows the time the last nap started and its duration -- is a little difficult to read. Id actually prefer if wakeful states were included in the list so I could more easily see the time the little bugger last woke up.

Also, an app this good deserves a better icon. A minor gripe, but this app made it onto the first page of my iPhone and so Im looking at the icon a lot...

Bottom line: For me, this application is just what I needed. Maximally informative. Cleanly designed, simple interface that does exactly what it needs to do. Easy to use in the middle of the night.

QUICK UPDATE: Theres a bug that frustrates me... If I start a feeding session by specifying a bottle with 3.5 ounces and say "Time It", when I later end the session and specify the end-time, the decimal place of the bottle amount is truncated. Even if you dont time the session -- if you create an entry with a decimal in the amount field, and then go back and make any edits to the entry other than the amount, then the decimal place value is lost when you re-save the entry. Tried to visit the developer site to send a bug notice, but the site seems to be missing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Less than half a day after posting the previous update, the developer contacted me to say that hes working on a bug fix. Awesome responsiveness. Awesome app. Six stars.

PopsicleChief about Baby Timer