User Guide
Master your stopwatch with comprehensive instructions
Why a stopwatch app is different
A mechanical stopwatch was built to do one thing: measure a stretch of time and show it to you. The cleverest ones could do a little more — the rattrapante, or split-second hand, was a second hand you could stop to read an intermediate time while the first kept running. That mechanism is where the word "split" comes from, and it is still the reason your phone offers laps and splits today.
What those watches could never do was remember. You read the dial, wrote the number down, and pressed reset.
Phones changed the economics. Every phone ships a stopwatch, so measuring elapsed time is no longer the hard part or the scarce part. What is scarce is everything that happens after you press stop — naming what you just recorded, coming back to it tomorrow, fixing the lap you logged by mistake, getting the numbers into a spreadsheet.
Most stopwatch apps are still faithful copies of the mechanical original. They measure, show you a list, and forget all of it the moment you reset.
TiCaNo Stopwatch keeps the session. You can name individual laps, save them, reopen them days later, correct a mistake, and export the whole thing in three formats. If the app is killed while it is running, the timing survives. This guide covers all of that, starting with the basics.
Starting, pausing and stopping
Tap Start to begin. The timer counts up from zero, and the controls change to show Lap, Pause and Stop.
Pause and Stop are different, and the difference matters.
Pause freezes the time and keeps the session open. The Resume button pulses so you can find it, and paused time is tracked separately from running time — it does not inflate your total. Tap Resume and you carry on in the same session.
Stop ends the session. There is no un-stop. Once you have stopped, the only things you can do are save it, share it, or reset.
Stopping while the timer is running always records a final lap. The segment between your last lap and the stop is a real measurement, so TiCaNo keeps it rather than discarding it, and marks it on the lap list. If you never tapped Lap at all, stopping still gives you Lap 1 covering the whole session.
Stopping while paused behaves differently: no final lap is recorded, because the trailing segment was paused rather than timed.
Laps and splits
This is the question people ask most about any stopwatch, and the answer is simpler than it sounds.
- A lap is how long one segment took, measured from the previous lap.
- A split is the total elapsed time at the moment you tapped Lap.
Run four 400-metre laps and your laps might read 62s, 64s, 63s, 61s — each one that segment on its own. The splits for the same run read 62s, 2:06, 3:09, 4:10 — the clock as it stood each time you came past. Laps always add up exactly to splits, because that is how they are calculated.
Which you want depends on what you are doing. Laps tell you whether you are getting faster or slower. Splits tell you whether you are on schedule.
TiCaNo shows either, or both. In the laps panel, a selector offers Lap, Split and Lap+Split, and the default is Lap+Split — both columns side by side. You can also turn on a summary row showing your fastest, slowest and average lap, and drag it to the top or bottom of the list.
The laps panel is one of several tabs you can swipe between. The others — a clock view showing the real-world time each lap was recorded, a session timeline, and lap statistics — are Pro features.
Naming laps and fixing mistakes
A list of times tells you what happened. A list of named times tells you what you were doing.
Tap any lap row to expand it, then Add title. Call it "warm-up", "set 3", "the hill" — whatever makes the number mean something when you come back to it. Leave a title empty and the lap reverts to its number. If the session is already saved, the new title is saved with it.
Deleting a lap. The same expanded row has a Delete button. Deleting is more considered than it looks: the deleted lap's time is added to the next lap, so your splits stay correct and your total does not change. Every lap after it is renumbered. If you delete the last lap while the timer is still running, its time is folded into the segment currently in progress.
The confirmation dialog tells you which of those is about to happen. There is no undo.
You can do the same editing on a session you saved days ago — open it from the saved sessions list, choose Edit, and rename the session, change its note, or delete laps with the same recalculation.
Keeping sessions
By default TiCaNo saves your session for you. Auto-Save is on out of the box, so when you stop, the session is written to your device and the Save button is replaced by Share and Saved Sessions.
If you prefer to decide each time, turn Auto-Save off and tap Save yourself when you want to keep something.
A saved session stores the name, a note if you wrote one, the start and end times, every lap with its title, and the total time you spent paused.
Browsing what you kept. The Saved Sessions screen lists everything newest first. From there you can open, share, edit or delete a session, select several at once, or export them together.
Opening a saved session switches the main screen into a view of that recording. Your live stopwatch is not lost while you look — it is set aside and restored when you close the saved session. You cannot record laps into an old session; it is a record, not a document you continue.
Free users can keep 5 saved sessions. Pro removes the limit. See the Free vs Pro comparison for what else differs.
Getting your data out
Everything you record can leave the app, in a format that suits where it is going.
Share sends a plain-text summary through your phone's normal share sheet — into a message, an email, a notes app. You choose whether to include split times, real-world clock times and the summary figures. Fastest and slowest laps are marked.
Export produces a file:
- TXT — written to be read by a person. Name, note, start and end, total, running and paused time, then each lap with its lap and split times.
- CSV — written for spreadsheets. One row per segment, with start, end, duration and the time paused during that segment, each given in seconds.
- JSON — written for other software. The complete session including the event log.
All three honour your decimal-precision setting, so an export matches what you saw on screen.
You can export a single session, or select several from the saved list and export them together.
When you are not looking
A stopwatch that only runs while you are watching it is not much use.
TiCaNo does not count frames. Elapsed time is worked out from the clock — the difference between when you started and now, minus any time you spent paused. Nothing about the app being in the background, dropping frames, or being frozen by the operating system can change the answer, because the answer is not being accumulated tick by tick. It is recalculated from the clock every time it is read.
On Android, a notification keeps you informed. Start the timer and a notification appears, updating about once a second with your total time and current lap, so you can check without returning to the app.
Keep Screen On is a setting, off by default. Turn it on and the screen stays awake while the timer runs — useful when you are watching a workout, and something you probably want off the rest of the time.
If the app is killed, your timing survives. TiCaNo saves a snapshot of a running or paused session every thirty seconds. If the app is closed by the system, crashes, or the phone runs out of memory, reopening it restores the session and the timer picks up where it should be — not where it was when the snapshot was written, but where the clock says it should be now.
Saved sessions and settings live on your device and survive anything short of deleting the app.
A cleaner screen
Distraction-Free mode strips the screen back to the timer and its controls. The laps panel is hidden, the decimals are hidden, and the lap counter badge goes with them. It is a toggle in the top bar, and it remembers your choice.
It is worth using for the thing it is named after. A running timer with a lap list updating beside it is a lot of moving information; sometimes you want a number and two buttons.
Fullscreen goes further and hides the top bar as well. Tap where the bar was to bring it back — it reappears for a few seconds and then hides itself again.
The laps panel has its own expand control, if you want the opposite: laps filling the screen while the timer stays small.
Making it yours
Panels. The screen is built from three panels — timer, controls and laps — and they are not fixed. Layout edit mode lets you resize them, reorder them and swap their positions, with separate layouts remembered for portrait and landscape. Entering edit mode is a Pro feature; leaving it is not.
The timer's face. The timer size is adjustable with sliders — the main timer and the lap timer separately — along with the gap between digits, which matters more than it sounds for the segmented and monospaced fonts. All of that is free. The font itself is a choice of twelve, and choosing one is Pro.
Colour. There are colour palettes for the whole app, three of them available free. Custom timer colours are Pro.
Backgrounds. A background can be a colour, a gradient or an image. Free gives you the first three preset colours and two of the gradients. Pro adds the rest of the presets, custom colours and gradients, and your own images from the gallery or camera.
Buttons. The control buttons have their own settings — design, shape, and a glass surface option. Free.
Sound and vibration
Feedback is off by default. Turning on Enable Haptics and Sounds activates it, and from there each of the six control buttons — Start, Pause, Stop, Lap, Reset, Save — can have its own sound and its own vibration strength.
Sounds range from a marimba to a car horn, or none at all. Vibration runs from a light selection click to a heavy impact. Session actions and general interface taps have their own haptic settings.
The defaults are deliberately restrained: vibration on the buttons, no sounds. A stopwatch that chirps every lap gets annoying faster than you would expect.
How accurate is it
TiCaNo reads the clock rather than counting.
When you start, it records the moment. When you ask for the elapsed time — every frame, or after a day in the background — it subtracts that moment from now and takes off any time you spent paused. A lap is stamped from the same clock reading that produced the display, and stopping freezes the time at the instant you tapped, before any of the on-screen work happens. Splits are sums of laps by construction, so they cannot disagree with each other.
Times are stored in microseconds. You choose how many decimal places to display, up to four.
What that means practically: the app is not going to drift because it was backgrounded, because frames were dropped, or because it was killed and restarted. Those are the ways a phone stopwatch usually goes wrong, and this one is built not to.
What it is not: TiCaNo is a consumer stopwatch, not certified timing equipment. It reads your device's clock, and it makes no guarantees for professional or critical timing.
Languages
TiCaNo Stopwatch is available in twenty languages, including right-to-left layouts for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian. By default it follows your device's language; you can override that in Settings.