A while ago, as a programmer who had never used Qt and as a happy KDE user, I was very interested to introduce myself to the Qt/KDE programming. Since I was also interested to become an open source developer, I decided to join the two things and to create a small open source project for KDE. The result is kronometer, a stopwatch application that I’m pleased to introduce here. Well, kronometer is not an alpha software, since it’s definitely stable and the latest release is the version 1.1.2. Unfortunately I decided to create this website only after kronometer, so I’ve missed many cool new feature posts. Of course you can see all the available feature in the kronometer gallery page (screenshot and video).

The latest minor version (1.1.x) introduces the ability to export the lap times on a file. Currently it’s possibile to export them to the CSV and XML format. There are also a couple of bug fixes. If you are interested, there is the complete kronometer changelog.

Why a stopwatch application? Because I missed an application like kronometer when I was preparing my BSc thesis dissertation. I needed a stopwatch on my KDE distro to practice my times, because my speech could not exceed 15 minutes. I didn’t find a KDE stopwatch. I found only a small plasmoid. Yes, this stopwatch runs, but nothing more. Of course in the web you can find tons of free stopwatch websites and use one of them (indeed, it’s what I did), but the question is: Why? Why I have to: (i) open a browser (ii) enter online stopwatch in a search engine (iii) filter the good results from the bad ones, only because I need a simple stopwatch? I think that a Desktop software compilation (like KDE is) should provide a set of essential applications (which KDE does), including a stopwatch (which KDE doesn’t). Now with Kronometer KDE can provide a much more powerful and customizable stopwatch to its users. Enjoy it!