Sideline Save is a personal software project I built to solve a problem I kept having at my son’s baseball games: I wanted to capture the important moments, but I could never know which pitch would become one.
Using the built-in Camera app meant making the decision too early. I could start recording before every pitch, fill my camera roll with clips I would later delete, and spend time sorting through nearly identical thumbnails. Or I could wait—and risk missing the beginning of the play by the time I realized it was worth saving.
Sideline Save changes when that decision happens. The app keeps the most recent action temporarily available without saving all of it to the camera roll. When something interesting happens, I can choose to keep the moment and still include what happened before I pressed the button. I press again when the play and its aftermath are actually over, so a fixed timer does not cut off the celebration.
The idea became real for me when my son hit his first home run in travel baseball. I could not have known before the pitch that it would be the one. But once the ball was hit, I saved the play with its beginning intact—and kept the celebration afterward, too.
That clip was more than proof that the technology worked. It was the kind of family memory I had wanted to preserve from the start. Building and using the app at real games has kept the project focused on a simple goal: save the unpredictable moments without recording everything that came before them.
Read the full story on Sideline Save.