Full Count is a great application for any parent, coach or baseball player who wants to keep detailed statistics on a pitcher’s performance. The app is simple, but also incredibly useful, having the ability to track strikes, balls, hits, etc. However, despite its usefulness, there are quite a few UI issues and missing features.
The interface pays homage to the classic baseball scoreboard, with its dark great background and green/red lights. The look is great and works well for this type of application. To start tracking a pitcher’s performance, you’ll need to start a new game. Then, you can add your pitchers and select one to start tracking. Once selected, a new screen will display a majority of the information you need to see. The top of the screen shows the pitch count. You can set a pitch count limit, which some leagues require, and this number will be shown in yellow when the limit is approaching, and red when the limit has been reached or exceeded.
There are six buttons at the bottom of the screen with the option to flip it over to show six more options. Your options for data input are ball, strike, undo, foul, hit, hit batter, stats, out and bull pen. So, if the pitcher throws a strike, all you have to do is tap the strike button and it will be recorded. If you make a mistake, the undo button will go allow you to go back one pitch. Tapping the hit button will bring up a graphic of a baseball field so you can choose a single, double, triple or homerun. You can also select put out, foul out and error. As you enter data, the app will display total walks, strikeouts and the inning count. The bullpen button allows you to choose another pitcher to track.
The most valuable feature of this application is the ability to track statistics. There are three main screens for viewing stats. The first screen will display a total number of each type of pitch. Another screen will show these stats broken down by inning. The third screen is a pie chart showing percentages of balls to strikes as a total, and a bar graph broken down by inning. You can view each of these screens at the end of a game or while the stats are actually being entered during a game.
Full Count tracks a ton of information about your pitcher and displays beautiful charts of the data. However, a major problem here is that the data cannot be shared. You can’t send the stats via email and there are no options to sync them to your computer using WIFI. Yes, you can take a screenshot and save it to your photo library to share, but that’s really not the best way to share the data. There should be an option to save it as a CSV file to use in an Excel spreadsheet. In addition to these features, the UI needs a bit of tweaking as well. For example, the buttons need some sort of response to the user when entering data, such as a vibration or click sound.
Overall, Full Count is absolutely a useful application for anyone involved with the sport of baseball. With a few UI tweaks and the addition of a way to get the stats off the device, this app will definitely take off.
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