What is Cronosport? How to use Cronosport Shareware Notes Cronosport requirements Some snapshots Revision history

Cronosport is an advanced chronograph for Symbian smartphones. It is intended to use during racing or sporting events, where you need to take times of several runners, whose start time has been spanned in a timeframe. Let's see some example: rally. Rally cars can't run on the same special stage at the same time. Dozens of cars leave the starting line at time intervals of one or two minutes. This small delay lets them run the same road, minimizing the risk to take over the next car on the stage. Cronosport lets you keep sorted all the times of the running crews, wherever you are on the stage. You just need to click a button on your smartphone everytime a crew crosses a waypoint. Cronosport updates the stage time classification on your screen immediately!

Cronosport has been packed with tons of features:

• edit the starting list
• add, remove, modify any entry in the start list
• move after or before any entry position in the list
• delay any selection of runners in the start list
• assign different time intervals on any selection of the start list
• reverse any selection of the start list
• change the start time of the first crew
• catch more times of the same runner, in the case of race course with more laps
• load and save start list and classification
• smart creation of runner names and numbers
• keyboard usage to get times without using the pointer

Cronosport has two main views to switch: start list view and standings view. In order to calculate correctly the stage times or the intermediate times you are catching somewhere on the stage or the lap, you need to know exactly the starting order and the time delays between those cars.
You are strongly encouraged to insert the starting order before the first cars are crossing your location on the stage, because some cars could cross queued and you could lose some fixes.

An example clears away any doubt about that. Here it is the starting list of first leg of Rally d'Italia Sardinia of the World Rally Championship 2005:

Solberg-Mills (Subaru Impreza) 8.30
Loeb-Elena (Citroen Xsara) 8.32
Martin-Park (Peugeot 307) 8.34
Gronholm-Rautiainen (Peugeot 307) 8.36
Gardemeister-Honkanen (Ford Focus) 8.38
Rovanpera-Pietilainen (Mitsubishi Lancer) 8.40
Duval-Prevot (Citroen Xsara) 8.42
...

As you can imagine, every row shows the crew name, the car, and the stage start time. Every crew starts with a regular delay after the previous crew: in this WRC round, the delay amount to 2 minutes, but in some rounds, such delay could be shortened to 1 minute, or some minor class crews could start with only 1 minute delay.

The starting list is wisely known in advance on the rally website or somewhere on the net, so it shouldn't be difficult for you to get such list and insert it in Cronosport.
If you are using Cronosport to take times of cyclists on a chronostage in the Tour de France or Giro d'Italia, you know in advance the starting order of the upcoming leg from the website or the sporty magazines. Best option could be that Cronosport downloads the starting list automatically from those websites, but that's not available at now, because there's no standard format used by the event websites.

As soon as you have been able to insert the starting list in Cronosport, you are ready to take times on the stage. Move on the standings view and click Mark button when the car crosses exactly your waypoint. Cronosport suggests you the right car you are expected to come, but there are several reasons the car is not exactly the expected one:

That's not a problem for you: just change the running crew with the choice list in the lower toolbar: the choice list contains the remaining crews, which haven't crossed the waypoint yet.

As soon as you fix the time, Cronosport updates the standings list sorted by stage times, with the best crew on the top of the list. That's how Cronosport works!

The start list view

The start list view lets you check the correctness of the crew order. You can edit any detail of the list with the lower toolbar and the List menu.
The lower toolbar lets you add another crew with the Add button or move up or down a crew, after you selected it in the start list. The selected crew is viewed with a different background colour. When you move up or down a crew, its start time is swapped with the crew which is taking place of.

Smart create: lets you create a start list without entering any name at all. You need only to define first and the last identification number of the crews and you may use some helpful hints, which lets you exclude some number patterns from generation. In some rallies ten multiples are excluded, because could be confused in radio communication or number ranges from 20 to 29, because they tend to be confused with range from 30 to 39.

Add: lets you add another crew to the list. You can define the crew name, the car name, the time delay from the first car start time, the class of the car. The car will be entered in the last available position.

Modify: lets you modify an entry already entered in the start list. You need to select some entry in the start list view through pointing the entry with your pen or your cursor. It's the same dialog of the Add command.

Delete: lets you delete the current entry. A confirmation dialog needs to be completed to acknowledge such deletion.

Span: lets you define different time delays between crews. You need to enter the first and last car position which are getting new start times and the new time delay between each crew.

Shift: under construction...

Reverse: under construction...

Clear: under construction...

The standings view

Under construction...

• Symbian UIQ smartphone (Sony Ericsson P800/P900, Motorola A920/A925/A1000/A1010)
• 150 kbytes free

Release 0.80 (Jun 2nd 2005):

• first public alpha release