Stopwatch

Management of time is an important aspect of any kind of business, or activity in general. Multiple methods can be used to handle your free time, either by setting up tasks, or counting work hours. Depending on your needs, Stopwatch comes as a straightforward utility with which to start counting seconds, minutes, and hours until a task is done.

One of the application’s main advantages is portability. This skips you the whole process of getting it installed, which also makes it possible to carry the application around on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own. However, .NET Framework needs to be installed on the target PC, because it’s a mandatory requirement for functionality.

The visual design is minimalistic, with rough, but intuitive set of controls. Unfortunately, window space is not really efficiently managed, with a lot of unused space, and no automatic resize of elements when dragging the borders of the main window around. On the other hand, aesthetics are not the center of attention here.

Control options only count as three. Needless to say that hitting “Start” makes the counter work, while the “Stop” button freezes time, but without bringing it to the initial value. Pressing “Start” again continues to count, with a dedicated function to reset the timer and start over.

Unfortunately, manual intervention is always required. There’s no possibility to set a time limit, nor make it count backwards. Moreover, there’s no list of lap times, and even if the timer doesn’t reset when stopped, you can’t save any values unless manually writing values down in an external text editor.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Stopwatch isn’t really the sharpest tool in the shed, with a rather poor choice of features put at your disposal, and a rather rough overall visual design. However, it’s portable, and can be used to count time from any Windows PC, directly from a thumb drive.