Name: momenTOGO
Platform: iOS
Price: Free
Description: Capture the moment & Share your memory
Our spotlight turns to Fred Scarf, one of our very own Berkeley students in Interdisciplinary Studies, who has spent 8 months creating this app for the iPhone. Upon seeing a close friend succumb to cancer at a young age, Fred embarked on a mission to give other teens and young adults a chance to experience what he and has friend could not – Prom. Featured on CNN, Scarf had created a nonprofit that threw Proms for those with life-threatening illnesses called “No Worries Now.” The app was realized through the inspiration brought by those that Scarf met throughout his journey.
The whole developmental team for momenTOGO openly credits their idea to Instagram, which closely resembles what Scarf has built. It’s the solution for that one time when you really wished you could post a video on Instagram instead of simply a photo. The layouts are almost identical – there is a newsfeed-type homescreen where you can see what all of your friends are posting. It brings over the liking and commenting features, but instead of the twitter-esque hashtags, there are simply regular tags akin to YouTube. There is also an explicit datestamp, instead of the Facebook-style “some amount of time ago” line that can be infuriating at times. They’ve relabeled the “News” tab as a “Trend” one, although the functionality is more or less the same, and the “Explore” and “Profile” sections carry over quite well.
The remarkable nature of the app is how it manages to combine a number of social networking platforms into one app. It takes the aforementioned concept and design of Instagram, fuses it with the video-sharing platform which is YouTube and melds it with the time-limiting aspect of Snapchat – videos on momenTOGO can be a maximum of one minute, which is noticeably longer than Snapchat’s 10 second cap. And it doesn’t vanish after a one-time view! It’s a rather convenient alternative to posting to Facebook’s terrible video system, and a more casual setting than YouTube if you want to share small things with only your friends.
The best part is that you can make your videos look professional even when you’re the furthest thing from a cameraperson. It retains the abilities to add filters and frames and adds the options of titles and music to really maximize your video’s potential. At the very least, it’s a fun thing to play around with, and capture “moments” – as they’ve been branded.
Most of the drawbacks, such as high data-usage and slow processing, are inherent – these problems are going to persist whenever you’re dealing with the large filesizes that are typical in video. But for those of you wielding an iPhone, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing it got a four-and-a-half-Clog rating! The rest of us on Android await your release.
Image source: momenTOGO
Contact Uday at umehta@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid
The post App of the Week: momenTOGO appeared first on The Daily Californian.