My Bullet Serve app for iPhone and iPad

4.7 ( 1847 ratings )

Sports
Developer: Opus Mobile Technologies

0.99 USD

Current version: 2.00, last update: 7 years ago
First release : 30 Nov 2009
App size: 743.99 Kb

*** ON SALE FOR THE BNP PARIBAS OPEN ***

My Bullet Serve (MBS) turns your iPhone into a powerful tool for measuring your serve speed. Find out what caliber your serves truly are and then track and fortify this all-important shot, ratcheting up your speed until it becomes the most formidable weapon in your shot arsenal.

Despite being a fun tennis serve speed measuring application, it is also a true instructional tool. MBS assist players in developing their serve by providing a convenient measure of their serve velocity.

*****
My Bullet Serve (MBS) was featured on Yahoo! It has been picked by Appolicious’s weekly selection as one of the brand new iPhone apps worth downloading.

*****

Want to fire more aces? If so, one of the elements that may be required is increased serve speed. But, how can you cultivate this elusive aspect of your game? How can you develop the kind of fearsome velocity that great players seem to dispense at will?

The first step is getting a calibration of where your serve speed is today -- something that had formerly only been enjoyed by tennis professionals in their privileged, radar gun-equipped environments. Now, with MBS and your iPhone, you can get an amazingly accurate assessment of your current serve speed.

MBS uses advanced algorithms that calculate your initial serve speed (ISS), which corresponds to the speed shown on TV. The computation is based on the position from where the ball was served, its landing location, accounting for the air resistance on the tennis ball while traveling on the opposite side of the court, as well as a player’s height. Supplying these values is easy, as MBS has a simple and intuitive interface, which includes a graphical representation of the court with a moving scale of feet and inches that further enhances the precision of data entry. The accuracy of the speed measurements has been validated through real life serves over 100 MPH from professional tennis coaches, and serve speeds have been correlated with video capture measurement methodology.

Two recording methods are provided: Tap and Camcorder.
The Camcorder method is extremely accurate, and allows the user to enter video information like frame rate, frame count to compute very accurately a given serve speed (accuracy >98 %) as well as bounce location.

The second method is a Tap method that offers to the user the benefit of computing serve speed measurement pretty much in real time. While the accuracy for this method is not as high as the Camcorder method, it is convenient if you want to get live feedback. To increase measurement accuracy for serve over 100 MPH, when user reaction time becomes more significant, a mode is offered by recording when the ball crosses the opposite baseline instead of when it bounces.

The MBS database tracks your top ten serve speed measurements giving you a powerful frame of reference as you progress toward a serve that can dramatically influence match outcomes.

These improved results combined with a newfound incentive to best your own top 10 serves rejuvenates your practice and motivates you like never before. And, a comparison with other player’s speeds can be used to further fuel your quest for increased velocity. MBS allows you to measure and store serve speeds for multiple players and view a ranking list of these players based on their fastest serves.

Note: A recommended practice for more accurate measurements is to keep your eyes on the ball, rather than the screen. Just locate your finger over the Serve/Bounce button and just press when the ball is being hit and when it lands. This reduce considerably user reaction lag time and produces more accurate measurements.

Available in English and French languages.

Pros and cons of My Bullet Serve app for iPhone and iPad

My Bullet Serve app good for

I have been working on improving my serve speed for a while but it has been very hard to get good instant feedback. My Tennis Club can only access a radar gun occasionally, as these are pretty expensive piece of equipments, not so easy to set up, etc... I found it pretty cool that I can now do that from my iPhone for a ridiculously low price, so I just bought the app last night and tried it on the ATP World Tour Final matches that I recorded last week. Very impressive results !!! The speed measurements were withing 5 percent, even with speed over 100 MPH. However, when going over ~130 MPH, it was a bit more challenging to get consistent accurate results... but I wish I could serve that fast ! My best serves are only slightly above 110 MPH so this wont be a problem for me. I cant wait tomorrow to challenge my tennis partners now !

I really like this application. If you have a friend or partner, you can help each other. While one of you serves, the other taps the buttons and then specifies the location where the ball lands in the service box – this landing location makes a difference in the speeds that are recorded. Interface in the app for doing this is easy to use. Its cool to see differences in speed for serves that use slice or topspin, and being able to save your top serve speeds and compare with speeds of others is entertaining as well as useful. A friend of mine took his iPhone with this application to his tennis club and recorded speeds as the local pro was serving. Once the pro got loose, the speeds reported by the application were right in the ballpark of what the pro indicated were his typical strong serve speeds. (This was additional confirmation that this thing actually works.) I’d say if you want to have some fun with your friends and get a reading on your serve speed, this is definitely worth while.

App could use some renovations such as innovating a better cam recording response system. Its a decent app.

Some bad moments

All you do is press a button to start and stop the time of your serve. You might as well just get a stopwatch. You also need two people to use it. Waste of money.

I really wanted to like this application, but real world usage is just to cumbersome. The tap feature for determining the speed of your serve provides a nice UI, but the accuracy is questionable at least, and realistically requires someone to do the tapping and specifying where the serve landed. The camcorder mode supposedly provides a much more accurate reading, but you have to know the frame rate and number of frames. The only way I can see to get that information is by using an application on your computer. The hassle of determining the number of frames to get an accurate reading is just too much. It seems to me that what this application really needs is simply to be integrated with the video recording capabilities of the iPhone. Record your serve, tap on the frame that starts the serve, tap on the frame that ends the serve, specify where the serve landed, and presto - theres the speed of your serve. If this app could do something along those lines to calculate the number of frames right on your iPhone, then youd have an app I could get excited about. As it is, its just either a cute and fairly useless toy, or one small step in a much more complicated process.

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