The Apple iPhone and other smartphones have spawned an entire cottage industry of applications that are helping these devices move from being simple communication tools to being computing platforms all their own. Some people have become “app happy” and compulsively collect and use many of the bewildering variety of applications available. Can’t identify a song playing on the radio or in a store? An app called Shazam uses the iPhone’s microphone to capture the audio, analyze it and tell you the song title and artist. It’s quite accurate, though it has problems with jazz.

Typography
In a similar vein, for designers, there is an app called WhatTheFont that uses the iPhone’s camera to snap a picture of some text you might encounter, and it tells you what font it is and what foundry it is from. It’s also remarkably accurate, although not always 100% so. Probably the biggest limitation is the iPhone camera, which has no flash and even in a bright room tends to take very dark pictures. This can make it tough for WhatTheFont to detect subtle nuances in letters, or even distinguish some letters at all. But even when the choice is wrong, it still identifies fonts that are close, if not exact, matches, which is helpful for creative purposes. And it’s free.

Colour Palettes
Another major category of designercentric apps lets you build, edit and share color palettes gleaned from colors one encounters in the real world. A good one is called simply Palettes, which lets you capture and create collections of swatches from a variety of sources, such as a photo in your iPhone’s Camera Roll, from a picture taken on-the-fly, from a Web site, or by dragging sliders. Once you have created a set of basic colors, you can make custom blends of two or more of the colors in a palette, as well as color schemes using contiguous or complementary colors.

You can e-mail palettes to other Palettes users, or you can export palettes so you can use them in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and so on. Generating palettes from pre-existing photos is pretty easy but depends on the quality of the photo. As with the WhatTheFont app, the quality of the iPhone camera is the weak link in the chain. Another limiting factor to Palettes is that it does not support Pantone colors, although other apps, such as Color Expert and Pantone’s own MyPantone app, do.

Technology
The world of apps is expanding rapidly. New technologies, such as Quick Response (QR) codes and Augmented Reality (AR) use bar code-like tags printed either in magazines or on other materials or virtual tags embedded in the physical environment. A webcam or smartphone camera can detect these tags and direct Web browsers to Web sites, launch videos and other rich media, or provide text and other “overlays” over the camera’s view of a location. Advertisers and marketers are already experimenting with these new mobile technologies.

All these apps and more are available from the Apple iPhone App Store, via iTunes or from one’s iPhone directly. Most are free or, at most, in the $9.99 to $19.99 range.