Momento for iPhone

I have never been particularly good at keeping a journal. Every now and then I get on a kick where I do it somewhat regularly, but more often than not, weeks or even months go by between an entry. As a result, most of my entries are guilt-ridden diatribes attempting to catch up on everything since my last entry. I love the idea of journaling, but I’m just not good at the actual task itself. Thankfully I found an app for my iPhone last year that was a perfect fit for my spastic journaling tendencies — Momento.

Momento allows you to collect your activity from the feeds of online services that you use throughout the day and store the information and media directly on your iPhone. The authors describe the app as “passive diary writing” which I think describes the app best. I may not journal everyday, but I do post photos to Flickr, Tweet and blog. Momento captures that information in a diary format. If I’m feeling particularly pithy, then I can also add a journal entry and capture a thought, or idea which is just added to the “life stream” that is stored privately on my iPhone.

What I like about this process is that my entry is done in context to everything else that I’ve been publishing throughout the day. So when I travel and I’m tweeting about things I see, checking into places on Foursquare, and posting photos to Flickr all the meta data of my day is already captured and I can focus on simply capturing my thoughts. It’s made journaling fun again because most of the hard work is already done.

The icing on the cake though is the execution. The app is gorgeous and rock-solid stable. I’ve been using it for over a year now and never had a sync issue with my feeds or a problem with the app crashing. Working within the app is easy on the eyes and alludes to the days when I would write in a leather bound notebook, or Moleskine.

The only thing that could make Momento better is if I could extend the experience to my desktop and my iPad. The developers have announced plans to do just that, but there’s no ETA on when to expect the sync services, or new software. I’m quite content with the app as it stands and all the extra development is just lagniappe in my book.

If you like the idea of having a digital Moleskine that automatically captures your digital life and provides you with tools to add greater details, then I can whole heartedly recommend Momento. It’s one of my top-10 favorite apps on the iPhone.