I’ve always been a big fan of one-touch mobile apps done right. They fix one problem, fix it well and fix it without making you fiddle through complex UIs. This is the only reason I like widgets on Android. They provide a great one-click interface for doing basic things. Not many apps on iPhone are like that and the ones that exist, are not famous enough to be used widely. Today I’ll tell you about one of them – Capture.
Capture handles one task, recording videos. It doesn’t improve the quality over the inbuilt Camera.app, it doesn’t provide many fancy filters and neither does it provide a fancy interface. But what it does is much more important for a mobile video recorder. It starts recording instantly. The philosophy behind this is that it’s easy to edit out unimportant parts of the video or delete unnecessary videos but it’s impossible to recover those precious seconds you missed trying to start the Camera app and switching to Video mode.
Capture.app’s load times are kept minimal and so is the interface. You just have an option to turn on/off the LED flash and to pause/record the video. For stopping recording, you can just press the home button. The video gets auto-saved. There are a couple of options in the Settings that allow you to choose front/rear camera, auto-focus settings, grid lines, auto save to Camera Roll and auto-orientation detection. The app also allows you to turn off the auto start recording on launch feature but in my opinion turning that off totally defeats the purpose of the app.
I’m a big fan of this app and it stays right on my first screen. Till now, it has never failed me. You may argue that the app is paid and adds nothing to the existing functionality. But, then again, it was never made for you.
Capture is available for $0.99 on iTunes Store for iPhone/iPod.
