Daily Selfie App Didn’t Survive iPhone Upgrade, Time to Rethink Priorities
2018-11-17 EveryDay images
I’ve been using Everyday.app on my iPhones since April 2011, using it to grab a daily selfie that could be used to create time-elapse videos. This was something that I began, in part, because these videos disproved something that I was accused of many years ago, that I only published flattering photos of myself while not giving others the same treatment. Anyway, lately I haven’t always taken the daily selfie, and I haven’t posted the videos in a couple of years, but I was really disappointed that my selfie library was gone (I had backed up the images in photos.app, but the everyday.app showed no saved images). So, what now? Seriously, I really didn’t need an app to tell me to take a selfie every day, and given that I had already been gathering the selfies into an album in photos.app it wouldn’t be too difficult to drop the images into an iMovie project and spit out ye’ ol’ time-elapse video. At the same time I looked at other apps that would do the same daily reminder/time-elapse video output. One app looked interesting because instead of a still-image selfie this app centered around a 1-second daily video (1 Second Everyday: Video Diary by 1SE). That’s when I stopped and began to reconsider what the point was of all of this daily selfie/yearly video stuff was. Why was I doing this?
There’s some “historic” value of my past efforts, in that these images spanned two relationships, my years as a university professor, followed by under- and unemployment, my CIDP illness, and my move from Florida to Las Vegas, but was it still worth the effort? I mean, why bother? It might have been marginally interesting when I was going through my illness, but only those who were close to me might find something there worth even acknowledging. Like American Civil War era Daguerreotypes (though with considerably less gravitas), maybe this idea to capture a daily image to be used in a time-elapsed video had run its course.
Funny that something that was essentially a technology glitch would cause me to reconsider the purpose of continuing something that I’d been doing for over seven-years. Why am I, was I, doing this? Not entirely unrelated, the job pressures of late has had me thinking about where I had been spending my energies. Blog posts have really dropped off, and I’ve put more energy trying to resurrect my podcast, but I’m left with the question about what I’m trying to accomplish.
I’m resolved that I have an innate need to write and post these rambling thoughts, but always stumble when it come addressing the question as to the purpose behind all of this verbiage. What’s the point? Silly me, extending a technology glitch into an existential quandary. Damn. I have to write and attempt to communicate, but looking forward I want this effort to be more than wasted background noise on someone’s unacknowledged social feed. So, like the daily Swarm posts over the first two-years working in the STEAM Lab here in of Las Vegas, I’ve decided to reduce posts from the former daily image & snippet to weekly reflections about what’s going on in the Lab. But I’m still left asking, what’s the point? It’s not like I don’t already take images/videos every day trying to capture what’s going on in my classroom/lab or some moment away from the classroom. Okay, honestly, in the end, what’s really irritating me is that I’m being reminded of Life’s Transitory Nature by the death of a goddam iPhone app.
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