knitCompanion

Review by eFreeware

knitCompanion, made by Create2Thrive Inc., helps knitters and fiber artists keep their place in a pattern. The pitch is simple: follow your pattern with fewer mistakes and less ripping back.

What makes it worth a look is that it does not ask you to change how you knit. You bring your own pattern, whether that is a PDF or one of the developer's kCDesigns, and the app keeps track of where you are. The free tier covers the basics, and a set of paid tools adds the tracking features that give the app its name.

Following a pattern without losing your place

The core of the app is row tracking. Every project gets a row counter and a way to mark your progress along the row, so you can put the needles down mid-row and pick them up again without guessing. Counters and a timer sit with each project as well, which is useful when you want to know how long a sleeve actually took.

The paid tools push this further. Magic markers let you count, highlight and color stitches, and there is a one-tap marker for quick tracking. The developer also offers an inverted marker setting, which lets you see the marked stitches differently. If you have ever kept a pencil tick in the margin of a printed pattern, this is the digital version of that habit, with the advantage that the app remembers for you.

For projects with shaping, the reminders are the feature I would expect to matter most. They cover at-the-same-time instructions and repeats, the kind of note that is easy to skim past and only notice twenty rows later. The developer describes the overall effect as making fewer mistakes and tackling new techniques, and that is the right way to think about it: the app is there to hold the parts of a pattern that are easy to drop.

Charts, PDFs and your own pattern library

knitCompanion works with any pattern, and you can add PDFs or kCDesigns to build a library. For charted work, the paid tier includes intelligent chart recognition, which is meant to take the tedious part out of setting up a chart. There is also an option to join charts and written instructions so that a single row marker covers the whole row, which sounds like it would help on patterns that mix the two formats.

The app links to Ravelry and Dropbox, so patterns you already keep in either place can come across. The developer also points to a Ravelry group for the app, and there is a kCBasics free tier that lets you create as many projects as you like from your library and use the kCDesigns on offer.

PDFs get a specific mention for mystery knit-a-longs, where each clue arrives as a separate document. Scribbling on your patterns is part of the paid set, which gives you a way to annotate as you go rather than keeping a separate notebook.

What you need before you start

Setup is built around your own materials. You add a PDF or a kCDesign from the library, create a project from it, and the tracking tools attach to that project. The free tier gives you unlimited projects, so there is no reason to hold back on starting a new one.

You can knit wherever you happen to be, on a couch, in a waiting room or on a long flight, without worrying about whether the pattern will load. The developer also notes that the tracking tools are patented, with two patent numbers listed, which is unusual enough in this category to be worth mentioning.

The app is free to download, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases that enable the Setup+Essentials tools. The split is straightforward: the free tier handles row counting and project organization, and the paid set adds the marker, chart, scribble and reminder features described above.

A steady fit for regular project knitters

This is an app for people who work from patterns and want help staying on track. If you knit from charts, juggle several projects at once, or find yourself recounting rows because you lost your place, the tracking tools are aimed at exactly that problem. The Ravelry and Dropbox links also make it a natural fit if your patterns already live in those places.

It is less obviously useful for someone who mostly improvises or works from memory. The app is built around following a written or charted pattern, and the value comes from the tracking layer on top of it. That is a narrow focus, but it is a deliberate one, and it keeps the app from feeling like a general note-taking tool with knitting branding.

The install base sits at over 100,000, with a 3.5 average from 954 ratings. That is a middling score rather than a ringing endorsement, and it suggests the app has a committed core of users without winning over everyone who tries it.

A tracking layer worth trying for charted work

knitCompanion is a focused tool, and it does the one job it sets out to do: keep your place in a pattern. The free tier is generous enough to see whether row tracking suits how you knit, and the paid Setup+Essentials tools are where the marker, chart recognition and reminder features live. If you work from charts or long written patterns and want fewer mistakes, it is worth installing and trying on a current project.

If you mostly knit simple pieces from memory, the tracking layer will not add much. For everyone else, the combination of unlimited projects, offline use and pattern library support makes it an easy thing to test at no cost, with the paid tools available when you decide you want them.

What's new in version 3.0.15

Making sure everything is spiffy for Fall!