With Precorder, you need never miss an exciting moment again.

Being able to record HD video with an iPhone or iPod touch is quite amazing, but each minute takes up an average of 80MB, so it won’t take long to fill your device’s storage capacity. Since it’s far from realistic to record everything you see, you’ll hope to press the button just before something amazing happens… but more often than not, by the time you hit Record, the moment will be lost.

But this concern is a thing of the past with Precorder. It’s a genius idea: as long as the app is running, it’ll quietly record whatever it sees but won’t save anything until you tap the Record button, then, it’ll include up to 10 seconds of what was just happening previously -- you need never miss another moment again. It’s a little bit like a DVR for life.

Tap and hold on the dial to make it expand, which makes it easier to select how many seconds to pre-record.

By default, it’s set to save the previous 5 seconds before you hit Record, but there’s a dial you can use to choose anything between 1 and 10 seconds. All your clips are saved directly to your device’s main Camera Roll, which is great if you need to switch to iMovie or another video editor quickly. But the downside is that you can’t delete files from within Precorder; you can only do that from the Photos app.

The flash and camera-swap icons are menus rather than buttons.

The app is almost as easy to use as the default Camera app, but the recording quality isn’t as good, and the aspect ratio is slightly different — at least by default. Just head to the preferences, located in the Settings app, and make sure Highest Quality is turned on to resolve that issue.

The bottom line. This is an excellent app that ensures that you’ll always be able to record an exciting moment without wasting valuable storage space.