Countdown Central 1.0.0

Today I launched version 1.0.0 of Countdown Central, my first App Store app launch in a very, very long time as well as my first app launched doing business as Taptronics. You can read all about Countdown Central here. Since this is my inaugural posting, I figure you may be interested to learn a little about myself and Taptronics.

I’m Norm and I’ve been writing iOS apps since 2010 or so. The first app I built was a tool to allow school district administrators to perform in-classroom teacher evaluations. This app was interesting in that it was the first mobile app my employer built and that the target platform was the brand new first generation iPad. Before then I was building web apps using Microsoft’s .NET platform, .NET 2.0 specifically. Once I built that first iOS app, I was hooked and didn’t want to go back to having anything to do with Microsoft. From there I worked at a few other places, developing iOS apps full time. I met a lot of people who were coming to iOS development from similar backgrounds. It was a fun decade and a half, I gained a lot of experience and made several friends along the way.

Fast forward to 2025 and my 55th birthday. I was fortunate enough to be able to take an early retirement to focus on family and to try my hand at independent software development, or as they say “indie development”. The idea of being an indie developer has appealed to me for a very long time and now I have enough financial independence to scratch that itch - enter Taptronics and our first app: Countdown Central.

Countdown Central was born out of my search to find a simple daily countdown timer app to track the number of days before my early retirement. The app I found was simple, free, and did the job, but was riddled with ads - I can’t stand ads in apps. Being that I have the skills necessary to build my own apps, that’s what I did and Countdown Central is the result. If you’re looking for a simple app to count down to the important events in your life, give my app a try. I think you’ll like it, and if you’d like to help me improve it, don’t hesitate to contact me. I have several features in mind to add to Countdown Central over the coming months, but as there’s only one of me, your favorite feature may not be added right away. I’ll post new and upcoming features to my blog, so check back often for updates.

Thanks! I hope you like Countdown Central and whatever other apps come down the pipeline from Taptronics