Save Your Words with Posterity: The Family Quote Book

Save Your Words with Posterity: The Family Quote Book

If you ever find yourself trying to remember those precious one-liners that your children come out with, perhaps Posterity: The Family Quote Book is for you. It’s a simple application that does one thing, and does it well: capturing quotations, along with a photo and the date to help you remember where and when it all happened. It also makes searching for quotations a breeze. Didn’t someone once say that having a child is like getting a tattoo? Here’s to a few more indelible memories!

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Book Me a Quotation

Posterity organizes its collectible quotations into a series of books. Each book can have a photo attached and a brief title to remind you what that book is about. If you have a large family, perhaps a book per person may be best. I found it useful to group events into books, as well as people, like Christmas 2012. I’ve also added a General section to allow me to collect quotations from reading books that I like to be reminded about.

Front screen summary of your quote books.

To add extra books, tap New, and to delete whole books simply tap Delete, then the red cross beside the book you wish to delete. There is also the ability to delete individual quotations, and you can always go back into a quotation to edit the text, photo and the date. Adding a new quotation to a book is also very straightforward; simply tap Add a new one, tap to enter quote and tap to select date. This last option is mandatory as every quotation must have a date added to it. Perhaps if you are remembering what was said and you didn’t know the date, this is not always going to be that helpful or essential.

Time Is of the Essence

What I like most about Posterity is the quickness with which I can add a quotation. Assuming you have already got your people set up in the app, you can concentrate on getting the text into the app quickly, remember to select a date (I just allow it to auto-select today) and tap Done. That’s it! Attaching a photo is something I often do a little later, or I try and find a stock photo from my own collection or the Internet to help illustrate the quotation. Sometimes it is good to look around you and find something appropriate to take a photo of, and if possible and you have time, you could even arrange people or things into a framed shot for the quotation.

Adding a quotation is quick and simple.

There is no export facility for these in-app photos, though, so be sure to not need the photo later, or take it with the built-in photo app and import from your library.

The Best One Liners

One slightly frustrating element of adding a new quotation is if you need a new line mid-sentence, as this isn’t possible. You can always pad the line out with spaces to force words onto a new line, but a carriage return would be most helpful. Pressing Done simply ends the editing, but then since the app is designed to catch the best one liners, maybe this is an intentional omission?

It would also be good to have a landscape mode to get a slightly larger keyboard to type, but again, perhaps shorter quotations are the aim here. If your quotation is exceptionally long, enough to extend off the small preview screen in the space beneath the picture, don’t worry — you can flick up and down with a touch and Posterity scrolls through your extended quotation.

Multi-line quotations would benefit from adjustable carriage returns.

I was slightly disappointed that the search function from the main screen doesn’t work across all books, but only for searching the book titles. Even typing a simple keyword such as “old” to get to my “Excuse me, why do you look so old?” from within a book returned no results. You can, of course, go into each book and search through each book’s quotations for a phrase, but if you only remember a little piece of something and have many books, this is just not going to help, which is a shame.

Every quotation has a date associated with it.

I would also like to be able to search by date, or perhaps even to do an “On this day” search from years gone, maybe even integrate it into a daily quotable that pushes into my notifications area. Now that would be awesome. In the meantime, we have the Timeline function that allows you to tap through a year then a month and see the quotations for that month displayed in a list view. It’s surprising how quickly you can fill books with quotations, and one good side-effect of Posterity is that it makes you want to listen more intently for those special moments to capture and quote.

Share the Joy

Social media integration is a must for an application like this, as you will want to share your funnies with friends and family. There is no Twitter integration, but Facebook and e-mail are catered for and work quickly and seamlessly direct from the app.

Facebook integration is essential and works just fine.

More than Notes?

There is much room for improvement in Posterity. Its basic text-grabbing ability is fine, but then I have Notes on my iPhone so why should I use another app to record quotations? Well, attaching photos is a great addition, but adding video and having the quotations searchable by date and also enabling a full cross-book search would be killer features for me. Having landscape mode might be useful too, if only to get access to the larger keyboard on the iPhone.

A good core product that will surely benefit from future product enhancements, Posterity has clearly found a niche that I’m going to be wanting to tell people about for some time to come.

Source : blancer[dot]com