I just wanted to share an iPhone app I came across the other day which I’ve totally fallen in love with. It’s called Momento.
Momento is a diary/journaling app, which I guess is fairly self explanatory – you can add text to days in the form of ‘moments’. You can also attach photos to days, as well as tags for people, events, and geolocation information if you wish. Momento also has the ability to passcode your journal, to hide it from prying eyes (the main reason I want an electronic journal rather than a paper one). It’s super-simple to use, which is part of its charm; it gets out of your way and makes journaling easy (low barrier to entry: check!).
You can browse through your entries in a sweet calendar view or flick through individual days. Take a look at the screenshots on the Momento website – this thing is gorgeous. It’s a joy to use, both for writing and reading, and feels pretty damn close to using a paper journal. It brings to mind Tweetie 2 in terms of its visual polish – in fact, it even has that cute little arrow that slides along the tab bar at the bottom of the screen when you change modes, just like Tweetie.
In addition to its kickass-as-it-is journaling functionality, Momento can pull in ‘social moments’ from Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, and Flickr. Fill in your account details for any of these services, and it’ll show your Flickr uploads, Twitter updates, etc, alongside your handwritten journal entries. In fact, it even grabs this data from the past, so you instantly have a very rough historical journal without having to write anything yourself.
My only real criticism of the app as it is is that there’s no easy / automatic way to export / import data. As it stands, you can email yourself an XML file of your journal entries from within the app, but there’s no way to re-import that data and the export is a manual process. Some kind of sync might be nice. It’s mainly for security purposes, just so I don’t lose my entries – I’m not interested in sharing them with anybody (I have a blog for that!). That said, paper journals don’t have a backup system!
I’ve been using Momento every day for the past week, and it’s brilliant. I’ve been wanting to keep a journal for a long time now, but I’ve never really given it a proper go. I’m intending to carry on with this now I’ve found a great way to do it – I’m going to try and write every day for a month, and then hopefully just keep on writing.