User guide

This is the complete feature reference for Herotime, the single-button multi stopwatch. It covers everything from your athlete list to the CSV that lands in your spreadsheet — organized the way the app itself is.

General

Herotime implements the patented Tap & Arrange method (US 11,080,947 B2): one primary button times many athletes at once, and the mode of your tap — rapid tap, short tap, or long press — decides the assignment. That single idea shapes the whole app, which is why a session always follows the same three steps:

1. Prepare — maintain your athlete list, select who runs today, and set the starting order.
2. Time — start with a tap mode, then tap once per finish-line crossing; splits assign themselves.
3. Review — check the session in the timing history and export it as CSV.

Timing itself is fully local: no account and no internet connection are needed while you time. If you are new to the app, do the Quick start first; for the method's logic in depth, see How Herotime works.

Managing athletes

Every time you record belongs to an athlete, so the athlete list is where preparation starts. Adding an athlete takes seconds: you give each one a short athlete code — the label shown on the stopwatch and in every export.

• Codes up to 12 characters. Enough for initials, short names, or lane labels. International character sets are fully supported.
• Keep codes screen-friendly. The practical limit is display width rather than a strict character count — as a guideline, anything a bit narrower on screen than WWWWWW (six W's) is fine. The app tells you when a code would take too much space and hints at what works.
• Edit freely. Athletes can be added, renamed, and removed at any time; a roster change right before a heat is a few taps, not a project.

Before timing, you select the athletes for the session and arrange their starting order. That order is what the stopwatch's tap modes and circular split assignment operate on, so it is worth a two-second check before the first start.

Managing groups

If you coach more than a handful of people, scrolling one long athlete list to select today's lineup gets old fast. Groups solve this with tags: you assign one or more group tags to each athlete — think of the labels in a modern mail app — and then filter the athlete list to a group when you set up a session.

• Assign tags to any selection of athletes: squads, training groups, age brackets, or a temporary group for today's meet.
• Filter by group when preparing a session, so the list shows only the athletes you actually intend to time.
• Combine freely. An athlete can carry several tags, and groups can be as permanent or as throwaway as your season demands — defining one takes seconds.

The stopwatch

The stopwatch is one button and your list of athletes in starting order. A session has two phases.

Start phase — three tap modes. Athletes wait in your chosen order, and three gestures cover every start configuration without any prior setup:

• Rapid tap — two or more quick taps record one shared group start, one athlete per tap. The gun for a heat.
• Short tap — starts the next single athlete in the order. Stagger a lane at a time, or handle interval starts.
• Long press — starts every athlete still waiting, in one gesture.

The modes mix freely within one session: double-tap the first pair away, short-tap a late arrival, long-press the rest.

Run phase — circular assignment. Once athletes are running, every tap records the next split or finish and assigns it automatically to the least-recently-timed athlete, around the rotation. You never aim at a per-athlete button; you just tap when someone crosses the line, lap after lap.

Fixing an overtake. Circular assignment assumes athletes stay in their rotation — true almost always. When someone does overtake, drag one time record onto another to reassign it; the rotation updates automatically and the next tap lands correctly again.

The volume button. The primary button does not have to be on the screen: the iPhone's physical volume button is an explicitly patented embodiment of the actuator. Tap by feel, eyes on the water or the track — with minimal impact on music playing at the same time.

Cadence. Herotime can also capture stride or stroke rates for an athlete's individual splits, so rate and split time end up side by side in the same record.

Timing history

Nothing you tap needs to be written down. When a session ends, each athlete's complete time series — start, every split, and the finish, plus any cadence you took — is extracted and stored in the timing history automatically.

• Review by session: open a past session to see every athlete's splits organized and comparable, minutes or months later.
• Share instantly: results can be shared straight from the history with the athletes you timed — or exported wholesale for analysis (see Export).

The history is the payoff of the method: because assignment happens at tap time, the data is already clean when the workout ends — there is no evening of transcribing.

Settings

The Settings view collects everything that is not day-to-day timing:

• Help & in-app user guide — the built-in guide described at the top of this page, organized into topic sections that stay open while you work.
• Timing preferences — options that adjust how the stopwatch behaves, such as using the physical volume button as the primary actuator.
• Support — if something is unclear or you hit a limit, get in touch; questions from coaches are what this guide grows from.

Export

Every session in the timing history can be exported as a CSV file through the iOS Share Sheet. From there it goes wherever the Share Sheet reaches: mail it to yourself or an athlete, message it, or save it to your files.

• Opens directly in Excel — or Numbers, or any spreadsheet — with per-athlete starts, splits, finishes, and cadence values as clean columns.
• Your data stays yours. The export is a plain file you own; there is no proprietary cloud in between.