StopWatch activity

Benjamin M. Schwartz bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu
Wed Nov 14 12:47:24 EST 2007


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Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> Is there a reason you haven't made the clock and the stopwatch different
> functions for a single activity?

Yes, but not especially good reasons.
Practical:
1. Clock is non-interactive.  It doesn't make sense to share it, or save it to
the journal, so I've disabled those features.
2. It was easier to write a new activity from scratch.

Philosophical:
1. If you want to know what time it is, it's probably because you want to know
how much time there is until some appointment (get to class, eat dinner, etc.).
 If you want to use a stopwatch, it's probably because you're participating in a
sporting/gaming event, or performing a scientific experiment.  These two
activities are temporally uncorrelated: just because you're doing one, doesn't
mean you're likelier to be doing the other soon.  Therefore, there's no
efficiency advantage to grouping them.  The reason they are together on your
digital wristwatch is merely proximity of hardware.

2. I like small programs that do one thing well.  I'm not sure if this is the
Constructionist Activity philosophy, exactly, but it seemed like a good idea.
If a program has two different main screens, that suggests that it does two
completely separate things.
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