After spending the first few years of my career slaving six hours a month on laundry and ironing, I did a cost/benefit analysis and decided that dry cleaning is a better deal. The only chores involved with dry cleaning are gathering your clothes, counting your articles and driving them to the shop.

The business of counting always sucks for me — I get distracted and lose count. Pen and paper are out of the question for this task, since I need at least one hand free. I figured that someone had already solved my problem in the App Store. I was right:

My competition

For $6.99, that lovely application could be mine.

Hell no.

Naturally, this meant I was going to have to write my own. I took on the challenge of solving the tally problem in the most flexible, effective way possible. I wasn’t going to write just a tallying application. I was going to write the killer tally app.

Tallymander is a UITableView-based tally manager. You can count up, you can count down. You can count as many different things as you like. You don’t even have to touch the screen: entries can be set up to respond to a firm shake of your iPhone. You can use it to count things, to keep score, whatever. It has swipe-delete. My favorite feature: you can email a report containing all of your tally data.

The interface was inspired by the alarm tab of the Clock app, which I love. Clock is a perfect example of how UITableView is the most badass interface scaffold ever.

I submitted Tallymander for App Store review tonight. It’s a good palette cleanser, having just shipped Oddage. I don’t want to turn into casual iPhone game programming guy. It’s also a fun experiment in usability, trying to balance power and flexibility with fun and ease of use.

Is it the killer iPhone tally app? We’ll see how it goes.