Reference
We're just one week away from Photoshop World Vegas and of course it's time to start locking down your schedule and choosing the classes you want to take. I remember using the Photoshop World App last year and saying "this is great, but It's missing one thing." That one thing was the ability to add things to your schedule that may not be on the official conference program list. For example, at 2PM I'm going to head over to the Adobe Booth and check out that Terry White guy 
. So while it was great being able to fill in all the classes I wanted to take, I still had to rely on my regular calendar for other meetings and activities. Well that all changes with the latest version. Shawn Welch did a FANTASTIC JOB listening to my feedback and feedback of others and updating this App to be the best conference App I've seen to date. First off it's a Universal App now, which means it's native to all iOS devices including the iPad. Secondly he added the one big thing I needed, which is the ability to put in your own custom events/meetings. That alone makes this a 5 star app for me, but Shawn didn't stop there. He added in some very cool social networking features like the ability to tweet and update your Facebook status right inside the App. He even added the ability to share your schedule with others via email or Bumping two iOS devices together running the app! Shawn thought of just about everything this time around. There's even the ability now to schedule backup classes. So if you just can't decide right now which of two classes you want to take, you can go ahead and put your first choice in a time slot and then add your second choice in so you won't have to scramble at the last minute if you change your mind.
Classes, Instructors or Exhibitors
You decide how you want to look up information about what you might want to see. If you like Joe McNally, then just tap his name and see all the classes he's teaching at glance. Or if you have an empty time slot, just tap it to see all of the classes happing at that time and pick one. Of course there's an Expo floor, so you can tap Exhibitors to see who's exhibiting and where they are. Once I got my schedule built on my iPhone I was able to easily send it to a couple of friends via email (even if they don't have the App it comes over as a nicely formatted HTML email). However, I wanted to also have the same schedule on my iPad. No problem, I just used the Bump feature to share the schedule to the iPad from the iPhone wirelessly. Once it was on the iPad in the shared section, I just tapped on it to add each item into my schedule on the iPad. Very cool!
You can get the Photoshop World App for FREE here from the 
I was very interested when I saw the description of this app while browsing the app store one day. Have you ever gone to a country, finding yourself wanting to know certain cultural information about it? For me, personally, it is a clear yes.
What I am most interested in knowing about when I visit a new country is what not to say or do, the most common way to greet people, how tipping works and where/if you give tips and also any special laws you should be aware of. Here is where Cultures come into play.
Interface
Cultures is definitely not one of the best apps in terms of design but on a positive note, it mostly follows the Apple UI, which is again at least a bonus.
I am however slightly annoyed at the way they are displaying the content. After tapping and choosing your country and the type of culture you wish to view (which is sadly put on top of a background image of the world) you get a screen where you have the text, inside a fixed height box, semi-transparent on top of that same background image. Please, just stick to the UI guidelines, it looks much nicer and helps me read much faster.
Whether the realm is web, print, fashion or any medium in-between, today’s creative, designer, photographer, printer, or aspiring artist, will tell you how important color is. Color is all around us and whether vibrant or muted; color inspires us, calms us and causes us to act and behave in a certain way.
As a designer I'm sometimes inspired by the way a particular print piece is laid out. I love great typography and often times I see fonts used that I wouldn't think to or remember to use together. So now with the WhatTheFont App I can take a picture of the printed piece and the App will send the picture up to their servers for processing and return back the closest matches to the fonts that I photographed. This is not a new concept. You can already do this on the web. However, doing it on the web requires that you scan the artwork first. So that means you have to have a scanner handy.
That's Cool! What Font is That?
I first heard about this App while attending Photoshop World. I downloaded it immediately, but didn't get a chance to try it until now. The first attempt was a miserable failure. It didn't guess anything even close to what the font was. The second attempt wasn't much better. I was ready to delete the app at this point, then it dawned upon me that the problem was in the way the first two examples I tried were kerned tightly together. The letters were touching! Therefore, the site was having difficulty figuring out where one letter started and where one ended. Unfortunately, these days it's quite common for tight kerning to appear on headlines. So with this in mind I tried it on an example where the letters weren't touching and it worked perfectly.
Get it here:
I've been going to Photoshop World since the very first one in Orlando. Over the years I've always tried to make it to the classes of other instructors when time permits, but I must admit that I don't always plan accordingly and often miss out on some great classes. One of the things I've been asking for was a native iPhone App to allow me to not only have the entire conference schedule in my hand, but to also allow me to plan my schedule right in the App. Today that dream has come true!
The NEW Photoshop World App is a MUST HAVE for any attendee
This was exactly what I was hoping for! The Photoshop World App is very well designed. Not only does it allow me to see the list of classes on the conference track and Expo show floor, but it also let's me see the classes by instructor. This is great because it allows me to quickly find the classes that I want to take. While a list of classes and even a list by instructor would be expected in this kind of App, the developer took it up a notch by allowing to you see "YOUR schedule" and any open time slots you have. If you see an empty time slot on your schedule via the "My Schedule" view you can tap to see which classes are going on during that time and simply add them. The App also adds the major activities such as the Keynote to your schedule by default to save you time. You can of course delete them if you don't want to attend.
I often come across great apps for the iPhone/iPod touch that work great and are very exciting to me, however there's a problem. Some of these apps are really only useful to people that have a certain piece of hardware or a certain piece of software on their computer or use a certain service such as a particular bank. If I make one of these apps the iPhone App of the Week, then chances are the app will only appeal to a small segment of my readers. So rather than profiling an app with limited appeal or ignoring the app completely (as I have done in the past), I figured I would group them together from time to time in one post so that there will be a greater chance in seeing something that you can use. So welcome to my first "iPhone App of the Week – Helper Apps!" Here are 10 of my favorite Helper Apps:
This one is definitely going to have more appeal to the Mac users out there than the Windows PC users. However, Windows users stay tuned, I've got a reason why you might want this too.
Mactracker has been a long standing indispensable reference tool on the Mac to look up the specs for all the various Mac hardware that Apple has released over the years. It's a great tool especially when you're in the market for a used Mac or selling your Mac and you or your customer wants the specs. Well now that tool comes to your iPhone or iPod touch. Just like the desktop version, Mactracker for the iPhone is organized by category and then by Mac type.
You might be wondering, "why do I need a Google app on my iPhone? Isn't Google built-in?" I wondered the same thing. The first time I downloaded the Google Mobile App a couple of months back, it was because the built-in Contacts app was soooooo slow at searching Contacts that I used the Google Mobile App instead. Once Apple brought acceptable speed back to the Contacts app via software updates, I deleted the Google Mobile App. Recently I put the app back on. I was intrigued by the New Voice Search. Although I love voice recognition technology, it usually doesn't work very well for me. It usually takes 3-6 tries to get the device/app to recognize what I'm trying to say. I have voice recognition in my car and almost never use it for this reason. So I decided to give this App a try just for fun. Although it's not perfect with my voice, it does work more times than not. Of course you don't have to use the voice feature at all. You can just key in your search words as you would expect.
Why do I need the Google Mobile App? Isn't Google built-in to the iPhone?
Beyond the new voice recognition capabilities, you're probably still wondering why you need the Google Mobile App? It's simple. The built-in Google search in Safari and Google maps are good! I use them all the time. However, they only search the internet. The Google Mobile App searches your iPhone data (Contacts) and the internet at the same time. Beyond that it offers suggestions and word completion for what it thinks you're searching for. Although Apple did speed up Contact searching, the Google Mobile App is still faster. The Google Mobile App also keeps a history of your searches to make it easy to do the same searches again. Another thing that sets the Google Mobile App apart from the built-in Google search in Safari is that it's Location Aware. This means that you can do searches for things around you. Yes the Google Maps can do this for businesses, etc., but it's not as comprehensive as all that would be available to you searching the full Google Search Engine.
Searching for Showtimes in the Google Maps App that's built-in to the iPhone just brought up a nearby theater.
