How to Tie a Tie

Summary

It’s Friday and the grueling workdays are finally over – at least till next Monday comes along. With the weekend comes the opportunity to wear something other than your suffocating suit and tie at the office. Speaking of ties, who the hell invented them and why are men forced to wear these odd pieces of ribbon around their necks at work? Fashion is a mysterious thing, but one thing’s for sure: tying ties can make mornings before work extremely frustrating. So in order to give you a better start to next week, I present you with How to Tie a Tie – an Android app guidebook for tying the perfect knot.

Ties are an extremely tricky thing. As a kid, I used to wear those embarrassing clip-on ties (apparently some adults continue to do so) just so that I wasn’t forced to actually tie one of those “death ribbons” around my collar. Whereas for people from my grandfather’s and father’s generations, tying a tie was considered as simple and essential as tying a shoe, today in the days of casualwear the art of tying a tie is slowly dying.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of tie-wearing occasions in our daily lives – whether it’s at work or at your friend’s wedding. And for individuals, like myself, who just cannot for the life of them figure out how to tie the damn thing, there’s finally a very handy solution.

The app How to Tie a Tie is meant to clear up the mystery of ties once and for all. Packaged into a portable application, How to Tie a Tie is always at your side and gives you the chance to scurry away to the nearest bathroom to put on a proper tie no matter the occasion.

How To Tie a Tie is as straight-forward as an app can be. It’s nothing special, really, just a collection of detailed frame-by-frame instructions on how to tie virtually any kind of tie. This may come to you as a surprise, but there are, according to this app, 11 different kinds of common tie knots!
And there names are:

• Atlantic
• Diagonal
• Four-in-Hand
• Half Windsor
• Kelvin
• Oriental
• Persian
• Plattsburg
• Pratt
• Simple Double
• St. Andrew
• Windsor
• Bow Tie (only if you’re really fancy)

What may appear like a simple and mundane act is actually a fairly complex craft. Knowing how to tie your ties (especially in multiple ways) may be a slightly archaic skill to have, but it remains extremely useful and practical.

So before you head off to your next business meeting, you can try out these different tie knots in front of the mirror. Each type of knot comes with a short description some of which include suggestions on what kind of shirts to wear with each specific knot.

Select a tie by tapping on it and slide through the commented illustrations for a step-by-step visual demonstration of how to tie the knot. The pictures as well as the captions are very understandable and clear so that basically anyone can learn how to tie even the most complicated knot. Admittedly, some ties are very tricky and will take quite a bit of practice to master, but this has more to do with the knot itself rather than app’s instructions.

Personally, I’m a video kind of guy and I would’ve preferred seeing integrated video guides on how to get the job done. Visual images just don’t cut it for me. Despite how practical How To Tie a Tie is, I would still benefit more from a good old YouTube how-to video.

Bottom Line: Having the ability to look up how to tie a tie on the go is obviously extremely useful for tie-wearing emergencies. For those people – myself included – that just can’t seem to figure out how to tie one, How To Tie a Tie is a great tool for your Android phone. Ultimately, though, the app is very basic and lacks a bit of flair and creativity. Tying ties may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but there’s got to be a more interesting way to present it to the user. In summary: very useful app with zero extra features.

How to Tie a Tie is so basic that it’s basically void of everything. There’s just a main menu with a list of different ties. Tap each one to open the detailed how-to guide. You can either swipe or tap the red arrows to navigate between the visual instructions. Both types of controls work perfectly well. No real design to speak because this app is as boring as that old Donald Duck tie you wear to work every day. But is it even possible to make a tie tying app flashy and well-designed?  I highly doubt it.

Everything runs as smoothly as possible. Hardly a surprise given how basic How to Tie a Tie is in terms of graphics and layout. Anything short of perfect in performance and stability would've been a total disaster for this app. 

How to Tie a Tie can be downloded for free from the Android Market and the app is entirely ad-free.