Storistic Review

It's safe to say that the social networking app world is pretty cluttered right now. Hardly a day goes by without a new one hitting the App Store, desperate to gain users from the clutches of the almighty Facebook. In reality, few of these pretenders have the kind of features that make them stand out from the crowd. While Storistic is a pretty situational tool and not really for those looking for publicity, it seems like a pretty good app for those users who want to share memories with friends and family across the world.

As the name suggests, the app is all about sharing stories and memories, collated together through a variety of different media. Crucially, it's a private social networking app, meaning that only the people invited by the user via email will see anything. This makes it immediately ideal for family gatherings and other private functions.

It's simple to set up, although I did find things a little slow going when it comes to importing photos and creating stories out of them. Admittedly, I've got a few thousand photos on my iPhone, though, which may explain it.

Users can opt to create their own storyline from scratch or have the app generate them, by picking out photos and videos from a specific date. The latter function works quite well, easily collecting up photos from a trip I took and making it simple to upload en masse. Captions and notes can be entered, adding some context to each image, but it's also possible to simply upload a bunch of photos at once just to browse. Similarly, videos, audio, and text are just as easy to include. The only noticeable omission I spotted is the inability to add location information which would have been a neat touch.

Rather uniquely, Storistic comes with a Capture mode allowing users to instantly add content to a specific Storyline. It's the kind of feature that's ideal when at a major family gathering for instance, saving users from doing everything manually. It's always a tap away from activating or deactivating, streamlining the process quite well.

Storistic does come with its share of problems, though. Noticeably, it is a little sluggish to react at times, with certain inputs also not responding particularly quickly. There also doesn't seem to be any way of inviting friends to Storylines that have been created before they were added as a friend, restricting the options available to users. However, for the most part, Storistic shows some promise. As a way of ensuring that far flung relatives don't miss out on what's going on, it's a good idea. Just one that needs some refinements.