In episode 34 of The Prompt, I mentioned Touch Counters as my app pick. Touch Counters is a simple counter for iPhone that lets you display up to four counters simultaneously on screen, touching each corner to count up or down.

Touch Counters is the only iPhone app with support for multiple counters I could find on the App Store, and it could be improved in several ways. Some of the UI assets aren’t Retina-ready (seriously), there are typos in the interface, and sometimes the app plays the sound associated with taps when you just want to swipe the sidebar away. From a design perspective, it’s not great.

However, in spite of these flaws and general lack of polish, Touch Counters works as advertised: when I need to count different sets of items at the same time, I can create counters and tap on separate areas of the screen, which are visualized with different colors. Each counter can have a text label, and you can customize the background and font color in a counter’s settings; counters can be saved with totals and notes, but they can’t be exported from the app. You can even change the default increment or decrement of individual counters in the Settings.

There are probably other apps that do what Touch Counters does with a more refined UI, but Touch Counters works and I wish I used it when I had to compile posts like this. Touch Counters is $0.99 on the App Store, and I hope the developer will soon release an update.