1 Second Everyday: Video Diary

this app is incredible. i have been using this for 6 years and to see my life, day by day, is so beautiful. I have my main “life” project, which I occasionally journaling and have clips from most days for the past six years. From that I have these branches that I have created such as moments in nature, different cities, I’ve lived in or for specific friends or aspects of my career. So beyond just my main life, I do have all these other montages of specific areas or people. this is a great gift when celebrating an anniversary or a friendship because especially if they aren’t expecting, it can be such a wonderful gift to them! It synced to the cloud and I don’t have to worry about it disappearing. Be able to watch each year and review at the end of the year is wonderful because it truly puts into perspective how full my life is. I can also hide things if I want it just for me and I can journal moments within the journal settings. There are times like a week or months without posting and it’s so nice because they have a feature that doesn’t auto fill so everything from your camera roll just gets put into the week or month you choose and you can fill in that space. it can also turn Live Photos into video which is such an useful feature. I’ve gotten in the habit of taking video or photos often so that can always translate into this app easily. This is truly been a life-changing app and for the decades to come I’m so excited to watch my life story.

With the exception of my photos themselves, this app is probably the single most important app in my phone emotionally. It has been a remarkable change in my life to be able to look back on all of the moments that I want to remember in such a compact format. my memory gets jogged of things that I had momentarily forgotten about, and I smile every single time I playback one of the videos. I know this is one of the more expensive subscriptions as far as a mobile app is concerned, but for me, it is worth the cost. Partially because I know from experience that this team running the app has personal investment in seeing it succeeded. I once had a bug in the app where I was having trouble getting access to my older videos, and their support team responded promptly, and a software fix was issued very shortly afterwards. These folks get it, and this is a service that I am happy to pay for. The app itself is easy to use, and the push notifications are ones I actually find genuinely helpful to remember to record my segment every day. I also love the ability to create ad hoc projects that are specific to a particular trip or event. This is an app that I genuinely wish I had many years ago. Thanks 1SE team. ❤️

I’ve been using 1SE pro for almost a year an a half during which they’ve made many updates. In general, I feel the updated trend in the right direction, increasing functionality of the app improving user experience. This update however is incredibly frustrating. The app now opens to a screen that shows all your projects as cards that you need to swipe through. You then need to scroll through until you click on the on the project you want every time you open the app. This makes no sense as I typically will only be working on one project at a time. Previously, switching projects was as simple of tapping ‘My Timeline’ at the top of the screen and selecting from a drop down menu. Now, from a project page, it involves clicking in the top left of the screen and then scrolling though other projects each of which take up the full screen. This must also be done every time the app is opened. The full screen cards that show your projects give no control over the images or colors you can use. I’d much rather look at a grid of my previous week’s 1 second memories than a title page with a colored banner and the thumbnail of the first second in my project. This UI update made icons to control clip settings larger which now makes it makes it necessary to scroll in order to access clip volume control. I appreciate when 1SE is quick and functional to use without excessive scrolling and clicking. This update creates unnecessary steps.