RaceClocker News #19
Easy manual sports timing
👋 Hello and welcome to our intermittently appearing newsletter with news, events, updates and other information about our race timing app. #happytiming
🪫 No connection and running out of battery? No problem (anymore)!
Offline timing just got better in RaceClocker. Timing a race in the back country out of coverage and then synching all data to the race server as soon as you got connectivity again, is common practice under RaceClocker timekeepers. But when during such remote timing your phone runs out of battery, or if you accidentally close the browser or web app page, your time stamps would previously be lost. Not anymore, as we’re now storing all time stamps that are made while offline on the hardware storage of your device.
This means that as soon as the device and browser are up and running again and connectivity is available, you can just reopen the timer app page via the link and your offline time stamps will be loaded back in from device’s local storage. They will appear in the various timer views and also instantly get sent to the race server.
This completes our second Big Initiative for 2024 (just two more to go).
Mass start race time toggle in the timer app
A smaller new feature is a toggle next to the running clock in the timer app, that alternates between real world time (the default) or mass start race time. This makes it easier for timekeepers to keep track of the actual race time and it better indicates when to expect the first race participants to approach a split point or the finish line.
The time stamps visible in the timer app as well as in the log will always remain in real world time (to make comparison with a backup system easy). This toggle is only available for mass start races and the clock runs in synch with the Mass Start Finish Clock
Live stream infographics
As an experiment we recently collaborated with the video publisher of the Irish Rowing Championships to make results instantly visible as infographics overlaid on top of the livestream coverage of this 3-day national rowing event. This is a preview of a bigger feature for later this year that’s currently in development. It will make it easy to publish customizable real time infographics for livestream video.
RaceClocker video tutorials 📺
To better explain both the basic as well as more exotic features of RaceClocker we created next to our feature documentation on the website a collection of tutorial video’s on Vimeo where you can follow along how to use our product and learn about the many detailed features.
Blog series #1 - RaceClocker for timing cycling time trials
Furthermore, we are starting a series of blog posts here on Substack where we dive a bit deeper in some of the sport specific features of RaceClocker and how they can be applied for various race formats. As a first, here’s one about timing a cycling time trial, where we show a range of best practices to make timing a time trial easy.
#happytiming #raceclocker
