In fact, there are two of them.
Lifelapse, which snaps an image every 30 seconds and strings the shots together into a one-minute video, describes itself as "a new way to capture your life." But capture is a tricky verb. Lifelapse captures your life in the way that you can "capture," say, a wild puma, or youth, or hope -- eventually, despite your best efforts, it's going to slip from your grasp, leaving you dejected and/or bleeding from defensive wounds in the hands and arms. In fact, the app's name is more revealing than its creators may have realized: It allows you to watch your life literally lapse, or, in Merriam-Webster's definition, "to fall from an attained and usually high level... to one much lower; to go out of existence."
So that's fun.
There are practical problems with Lifelapse, not just philosophical ones, as Michael Rose points out in TUAW. The app more or less requires the use of a supremely dorky accessory: The Lifepouch, a slipcase that allows you to hang your iPhone around your neck with the camera lens exposed and facing outward:
Never mind the obvious drawbacks of this plan: reduced battery life, hundreds of pictures you don't want, your friends abandoning you because you look like a complete tool. Here's the biggest problem: you are wearing your iPhone around your neck while you are strolling around Insert Exotic Locale Here, where you will rapidly be identified as both a) a tourist and b) the possessor of more money than sense. How many iPhones will be purloined from around unsuspecting necks before this pouch concept gets canned? The app should warn you on launch to make sure Find My iPhone is activated.
At least Lifelapse doesn't allow you to actually see yourself wrestling Time and losing, as an app called Everyday does. I should say that the intentions behind Everyday are imaginative and provocative; it's a Long Now-ish performance art project wrapped up in a reasonably-priced app. It's thematically similar to but less automatic than Lifelapse, requiring you to manually snap an image of your face (or your dog's face, or the view from your kitchen window) every day at a given time. On command the app strings together the collected images into a timelapse video, which you can watch while drinking and crying. You could argue that Everyday's functionality is very cool; it's a way of visually annotating one's life over a long period of time. You could also argue that it's really upsetting, documenting as it does the inevitable entropic march of all people and things toward the Abyss.
Not that I want to be a downer about this.
{pushes back desk chair and sobs brokenly for eleven minutes}
Look at the bright side, though. Everyday at least has functional applications. Here's an idea I just had: Point it toward that mole you don't like the look of every day at 11 AM, and after six months or so you can push "Play" and watch the thing widen and darken, its margins hardening like the petals of a poisonous flower in a horrible little dance of doom. It'll be awesome! For your sake, I just pray it's not too late.
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