As a beginner in the whole road race thing, I started out with the excel spreadsheet and just printed out a list of runners so course officials knew who was who on the course. I thought there just had to be a beter way so I went to the Apple Store looking for a solution to a simple problem: I wanted an application that would let me make a simple database of the people running in a series of races my A/V company was sponsoring so I could quickly and easily identify them by bib number and get all of their details. We were using clipboards with a bunch of paper - but it quickly became evident that all of the pertinent race information, plus background information like home town age, running companies,etc in addition to really important information like emergency contacts, allergies, etc. quickly got unwieldy, just like this sentence. While paper was somewhat cheap, when you considered how much it cost to print it out for everyone and the sheer cumbersomeness of it and environmental impact, we looked for something better.
To my surprise, out of the hundreds of thousands of apps on the app store, nothing fit the bill. So then we tried some general database applications. They were really bad, and a lot of them used the odd iOS keyboard that has numbers from left to right instead of in a calculator configuration. Not to mention they were really expensive apps!
So what did we decide to do? Build our own app! We've been using it for a year, and it's incredible, easy to use, and really, really fast.
Anyway, I encourage you to check it out. We're quite proud of it because it's a simple app that provides a simple function. It does one thing, and does it extremely well. We're touting it as the clipboard database for the price of a clipboard. In fact, it cost less than the clipboards that we bought at Staples.
Note it's for the iPad only. I found the iPhone a little too small to have a good user experience for the app's intended purpose.