Ever go on an amazing trip and wish you had chronicled your experiences with digital notes, audio and exact locations along the way? Want to share how it went at a convention with family and friends? With the My iStory app for the iPhone, all of that is possible and more.
Overview
The My iStory app helps users to chronicle their experiences right away after launch by asking to import photos. From there, you are able to easily create new event or diary entries, display a map of the points of interest from those entries, organize galleries of photos, create eBooks and slideshows.
The Entries is where most users will start. Simply tapping the plus button will pull up an area to scribe daily musings, attach a photo, select a date the note belongs to, tag the location of where the entry belongs and record an audio clip to save even further detail.
Features of My iStory include:
- Import All iPhone Photos for an Instant Diary
- Diary Entry with text, photo, date, location and audio
- Create an eBook to print or email
- Create a SlideShow
- Share photos to Twitter and Facebook
Five options for each entry may seem like a lot of work when creating a note, but that is the point. A high amount of detail for journaling is what this iPhone app is good at. I liked being able to pinpoint several spots in my city of where I went and what I did.
There were a few things that could be improved, such as I wish the location option integrated with the Foursquare location based social network which would make finding businesses easier, and a hybrid map view, which would allow the tagging of rural spots to be more precise.
But where the Entries section really shines is the audio record option. This is as close as I have come to creating a personal podcast of my daily activities. By being able to record a supporting voice note onto a photo with text and a location, you will have the most complete details of where you were and what you were doing.
Organization of media that is so easily created with the iPhone is difficult to wrangle. I have been trying for years to organize sets of photos and videos. The latest iOS 7 update assists a little, but a third party app like this with a gallery option is best. With My iStory, a security code helps to keep your photos under lock and key.
Creating a nice story in an app is fine, but what if you want to share it with family and friends? That is where the Books option can help. Tapping the plus icon again, brings up a title area, start and end dates of the photos to include and a slider of how many photos to embed. From there, the title is centered on the front page with the dates, proceeded by pages of photos. Usually there are four photos per page when creating a book. Tapping on the top right button after the book is created brings up options to email the eBook or print it.
If a static book is not your thing, the developers have created a nearly automatic Slideshow option. It asks for a title, start and end date to pull the photos from, like the Book option, but it creates a video instead. The title shows up first for a few seconds and then the photos are randomly layered on top of each other. Once the video is created, it can be recalled at any time. However, the video lives in the app and for right now, is not exportable or sharable.
Overall, My iStory opens fast and does exactly what it says it can do. I liked how the feature menu is only one tap away. The Books and Slideshows are fun and quick to create. While the Books are exportable via email and printing, I wish the videos from the slideshows could be saved back to the camera roll.
Verdict
My iStory is an easy yet powerful way to track daily events, that big trip around the world, or to create a personal podcast of ideas and keep them safe on your iPhone. The user design is nice and polished enough for use on a regular basis. Give it a try, its price is quite reasonable.
Rating:3.5/5.0[rating:3.5]
Price: Currently $.99 cents in the App Store for the iPhone. [DIRECT LINK]
Pros:
- Easy interface
- Create and Share or Print a Book of memories
- Diary entries with text, a photo, location and voice note
- Create galleries of important photos
- Password protect the data in the app
Cons:
- Slideshows are not exportable
- Location map tagging could use a hybrid view
- No Dropbox or Evernote support
Final thought:
Video on Facebook and Instagram is a big trend right now. The developer should look to add the ability to create 16-second square videos in the Slideshow mode with music.
*Note: The above review was commissioned by the developer in accordance with our app review policy, and has been written in an objective, unbiased fashion.
