Last week I wrote about StatusCam, the first app from ReviewForest Labs. The second one is smaller, softer, and much closer to home: I built it for my daughter.
The words you think you’ll never forget
Every toddler has them. “Nana” for banana. “Wawa” for water. A whole invented grammar that only the family understands. And then one day, without any warning, they just say the word correctly. The wrong version is gone, and it doesn’t come back.
You think you’ll remember. You won’t. And if your camera roll looks like ours, it has three-minute birthday videos and blurry playground clips, but not a single recording of the one word you’d give anything to hear again in ten years.
A jar full of words
WordJar is exactly what it sounds like: a jar you fill with words. You open the app, pick a word, and a big friendly picture fills the screen. Your child names what they see, you record a short video, done. WordJar stamps the word, the date and your child’s age right into the video, so even a clip that later leaves the app still tells you they were 2 years and 3 months old when “helicopter” was still “hopter”.
Each word collects recordings over time. Tap through them and you can hear the same word grow up.
There’s also a bonus feature we definitely spent too much time on: WordJar can stitch snippets of your recordings into a little word song, complete with a backing track it synthesizes on the spot.
Your kid’s videos stay on your device
This part was non-negotiable for me. Recordings of your child never touch our servers, because there are no servers. WordJar stores everything locally on your device, there is no account and no upload, and the app keeps working offline. On iPhone and iPad you can optionally let it save every recording to your Photos library, so your normal iCloud backup covers them too.
Free, on the web and in the App Store
WordJar is free and made by us, ReviewForest GmbH. It runs in any browser at wordjar.net (add it to your home screen and it behaves like a regular app) and as a native iPhone and iPad app on the App Store. It speaks English and German.
If your toddler currently owns a word you’d hate to lose, you know what to do.
