Twixt Time 4+

Pretty good, but only if you picture is.....

On the average, the app works pretty well. I am tracking 4 different timepieces, all with automatic movements. Once you have a few entries for that timepiece, it averages out to right at what I was calculating by hand, using an atomic clock.

The most difficult part is in taking a quality image of the face. You need even lighting, with no glare (like from a lightbulb), and you need to hold the phone "square" to the watch face. You need to be able to see every minute market, regardless of how many you have, with equal clarity and they must all be at the same angle. If you do not accomplish this, the "12:00 marker" will not line up properly and you will notice that the lines for the hands do not fall perfectly in the middle of each hand. If these do not happen, you will receive inaccurate measurements. Should you proceed, despite the problems I described, it will require several measurements before the average works out to be accurate.

This app saved me a huge headache!

I have been using Twixt for nearly a decade and recently took my watch in for a service (which thanks to Twixt was showing a slow degradation in performance over a couple of years). When I got the repaired watch back from the watchmaker something looked amiss but I couldn't tell what it was. Thanks to Twixt I was able to see photos of the watch before the service and immediately it was clear that the watchmaker had replaced the hands with slightly different ones. I never would have been able to know this without a long history of photos of the watch. It was also very easy to show the watchmaker the error since there wasn't much to argue with about the clear evidence of the incorrect hands. I was able to share screen shots with the watchmaker to show the change - an idea to improve the app would be an ability to export/import timelines. Otherwise the app has been matured to perfection as the developer has made continuous improvements to it over the years. Thanks!

Tedious, inaccurate

I didn't think it was possible for them to make an app worse than Kello, but they did. This is very tedious to use and very inccurate. You have to take a photo of your watch and manually locate the cetner, 12 o'clock, hour, minute and second hands on the screen...repeat to get a reading. After all that, it said a mechanical watch of mine was runnning at +12 minutes per day---which is not even in the ballpark. A real timegrapher shows it is running ~+4 seconds. Don't bother with this one.

Developer Response ,

Hi CAG_1337, We have added a lot of features since version 1.02 to assist with the positioning of the hands and would love to hear what you think of the app today. You may also find it helpful to note that it is important to capture successive Snapshots at least 24 hours apart. Snapshots that are taken less than a day apart will multiply any errors due to parallax, beat rate, and/or hand position. The purpose of the Timeline lock, which can be enabled or disabled in Settings, is to guard against such errors. For the most accurate results, it is best to wait 24 hours before adding a new Snapshot to a Timeline. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel most welcome to reach out via email, at twixt@coldflower.com

UPDATE:

Thank you for taking the time to repost the review that you wrote back in 2013. I can only begin to imagine how frustrated you must feel. I would love to help you get the most out of Twixt Time and would be happy to investigate why you encountered the results that you did. As before, please feel most welcome to reach out to twixt@coldflower.com for support. Mention that you are CAG_1337 and I will attend to you personally, so that you do not need to articulate again anything that you have already here. Thank you for your passion for horology and precision. I admire it.