App review: Momento
January 4, 2010
by: Christine Chan
Journaling is a great way to keep a record of our daily lives, but sometimes we just don’t find the time to do it. But what about a digital ‘journal’, that integrates our social streams and new snippets of our slice of life, complete with photos? Well, there’s an app for that. Meet Momento, the nifty journaling app that will keep your life together in a beautiful interface.
Momento is there to help you keep track of everything that happens each day. It does this wonderfully by importing all of your status updates from Facebook, Twitter (with an option to not include @ replies), uploaded Flickr photos, and loved tracks from last.fm.
Upon first launch and set up of your social accounts, Momento will go and fetch your Facebook and Twitter updates as far back as several months, even up to a year. For me, it went back as far as August 6, 2008, although the farther back it went, the more sporadic the updates were.
Facebook and Twitter status updates are of course, plain text. Even if there are links, they are not clickable, and there is no in-app web browser. This is, after all, a journaling app, not a social networking app. It’s to keep track of what you’ve posted so you don’t forget (especially since Twitter can’t exactly keep track of everything you’ve ever tweeted). It’s also nice to see all the little Facebook updates you’ve ever done in one app. Most of them you’d probably never remember otherwise, and it’s fun to look back on these little things.
Flickr uploads show up more visually in Momento, though you can’t view the photo full-screen. You’ll see a thumbnail image that appears in the app as a little snapshot taped to the notebook paper background that constitutes Momento. Despite the drawback of not being able to view it full-screen, Momento’s feel with dealing with Flickr images feels very ‘journal’-like, which is exactly what the developers must have been going for.
The integration with last.fm only applies to loved tracks, which appear in the daily journal entries as plain text with the last.fm logo. The scrobbling service that last.fm is known for will not appear in Momento, which is sort of a let down. It would be cool to see all the music you’ve played, though I suppose they did it this way so that the entire day won’t drown in a sea of last.fm played tracks. But just keeping a record of loved tracks is a good way to go back and see what music you liked over time.
The main course of Momento lies within the magic of creating ‘entries’ throughout the day. Not only does Momento provide a simple and elegant ‘notebook’ UI for you to write in, it also allows you to rate that particular moment and a slew of other features: tagging people, places, events, and even custom tags if those provided aren’t enough.
The user can even attach up to 8 photos in the entry, which will be attached to the moment as a little polaroid thumbnail, though you can view all photos full size by tapping that polaroid. When viewing photos, the interface is a familiar one – just swipe the screen to view multiple photos.
After saving a new moment or just opening up the app, you’ll see the main screen which displays dates and the month, and snippets of the entries for that day, with the very first one leading the list. Any rated entries will have stars displayed for the day, along with the number of actual private moments in orange, and social entries in blue. Along the right side of the days is a snapshot of how many tagged people, places, events, and Twitter/Facebook/last.fm/Flickr can be found for a particular day.
If you don’t like the Days view (the default), you can change to the Calendar view, which displays dots on days where there are entries (orange dots represent actual private ‘moments’, whereas the blue dots represent any social feed present). The calendar feels very much like the iPhone’s own Calendar, and you can go through each month or even year. Beneath the calendar are the first letters of each month, of which you can scroll through and select to jump to a particular month.
You can also view by Tags, which allows you to view entries labeled with any individual tag (Events, People, Places, Rating) or even just view all of your Social Feed entries.
If one is unsure of keeping such private moments on their iPhone, Momento has an Export Data feature which will generate an XML plist file which can be read with any text editor. This file will be generated within the app and the user can email it to themselves with the in-app email feature of iPhone OS 3.0.
If privacy is your thing, minds may be put at ease with Momento’s passcode lock feature. Set up a 4-digit passcode and then it will be required in order to access the app. However, this will only come up when the app is being launched – if the device goes to sleep, Momento will not ask for passcode when the device wakes up.
Momento really brings a unique approach to the iPhone journaling experience, and it is very polished for a 1.0 app. If they can fix the passcode so that it requires input at all times rather than just app launch, that would make it perfect. As well as perhaps having the days entries in descending order from most recent and also having the option of importing the exported data (via a link in the email with the XML plist file). That way, the data can go back in the app, rather than having to start over but have a separate backup file outside of the app.
Momento has great potential, and it can only be improved in future updates. I highly recommend it, since it makes journaling fun, and adds its own unique twist with the social network integration.
Learn more about the Momento app for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store
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