Creative people never truly leave their work behind. Designers in particular are always imagining something new for the next project, and never before has there been so much technical support for keeping up with those dreams accessible at the touch of the fingertips. iPhone apps are bringing designers’ thoughts from their imaginations into reality 24/7. Whatever you have been waiting for is here. Just take a look at these ten terrific apps.
The Typography Manual
The Typography Manual is just that—a manual with features that are more helpful than a print book. It is actually two apps in one—a manual and a set of resources. The fabulous mix of tools and reference has educational information, such as a history of printing, as well as functional helps for doing the job. Its 100-term glossary of typography gives you a definition and then it shows what it looks like. The style guide covers grammar and typographic rules. It has an em calculator, a font size ruler, a standard ruler, and a conversion table. The manual has a full listing of standard html codes for letters, numbers, and special characters. Updates are added regularly.
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Palettes Pro
Palettes lets you create and maintain color palettes. It gives you the ability to automatically load color palettes from a website, or to use a camera to capture an image from life. It is compatible for use with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks, GIMP, Paintshop Pro, and OS X Color Chooser. One especially nice feature is that the pallets can be emailed without leaving the application. You can mix your own colors or you can use Palettes to generate monochromatic, analogous, triadic, and complementary color schemes. Real world items can be compared to a full-screen display to check accuracy. Never worry about losing your hard work because Palettes can automatically save the work as you go.
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Files
File is aptly named because it allows you to store and view files on your iPhone. You can connect to files from any Mac or PC and drag and drop files to your iPhone just as you would with any other shared folder. Sharing is easy because it works with all standard word processor documents, rich text, adobe pdf, html, images, video and audio files. Zoom and pan in your choice of either landscape or portrait mode to get the view that best fits your project. It has security settings for both remote and local access, so your work stays yours.
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Paint for Evernote
Evernote can create text, photo, and voice notes on your iPhone. Whether you take a picture of a big whiteboard presentation or snap an image of a tiny business card, Evernote can recognize the text in those images and make a note of it. Everything you capture is automatically indexed, even handwritten text on images, so you can find it later by searching for keywords, titles, or tags. Some printers are capable of printing your Evernotes directly, but if yours isn’t, you can always route them through your computer to a conventional printer.
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Units
Units is a unit converter, plain and simple. While there are plenty of free converters available, it is worth taking another look at Units because it’s comprehensive, it works like a calculator, and it is so fast that it converts even as you are entering the values. The modes you use most often can be saved so you don’t have to go through menus every time you use it. One tap will reverse the direction of a conversion; converting yards to meters becomes meters to yards with one press of a button. In addition to converting length, area, volume, mass, weight, force, torque, speed, pressure, power, luminance and time units, it also coverts currency. The exchange rates are updated daily and can be manually updated at any time.
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ShapeWriter
Shapewriter frees you from the frustration of miniaturized keyboards, For composing words with ShapeWriter, you use your finger to trace pathways between the letters. For example, sliding your finger from the z key to the e key to the s key to the t gives zest. ShapeWriter recognizes the word and displays it on the screen. It is very cool—and on ShapeWriter you can ignore double letters, so that makes it very c-o-l. If you want to use an unusual word that is not stored in its 60,000 word lexicon, you can type it in and add it to the memory. ShapeWriter also takes care of most of the spacing and capitalization for you, making this one of the fastest ways to take notes ever. It even comes with a tutorial balloon popping game to speed your learning curve.
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Brushes
Brushes is the one app that takes your touch screen from finger painting to real painting. Brush sizes range form one to sixty-four pixels and come in three different styles. Brushes comes with an inexhaustible supply of ‘paint’ in any hue or saturation, including transparency. You don’t have to start with a blank canvas unless you want to; you can also paint over photos from your photo album/CameraRoll. Brushes can support up to four layers of painting that can be rearranged, deleted, merged, or copied. Your paintings can be stored and viewed in your iPhone gallery.
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Color Expert
Color Expert is a portable palette that uses “snap & tap” technology. The snap is snapping a picture and the tap is the application’s ability to analyze and tap into the dominant colors from the photo and then render a perfect color scheme. It lets you capture colors from any place that your iPhone can travel, match them on the interactive color wheel, and save them for use on your projects. The color wheel can be set to work in either artistic pigments (RYB) or in scientific light values (RGB). The swatch book feature acts as an on-the-go reference chart.
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iBlueSky
iBlueSky is a terrific app for the visual organization of thoughts and ideas. In a blend of simplicity and function, this app helps you create a mind map to see how your ideas naturally group together. It keeps your inspired ideas from becoming sidelined or lost in the crowd of other thoughts. iBlueSky makes adding new branches and sub-branches incredibly simple. Navigating through your mind map is easy and uncomplicated, so you won’t get lost in thought. Once you’ve organized and completed the project, your mind maps can be instantly emailed in PDF and PNG formats to any contact on your phone.
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ZeptoPad
ZeptoPad is an application that lets you turn your iPhone into a note pad or whiteboard. If you had concerns about its rocky launch last year, be assured the bugs are out and this app is ready to perform. Make freehand drawings and take handwritten notes in your choice of color and line width. In addition, the toolbox offers an assortment of rectangles, circles, arrows, and connectors that can all be easily stretched, skewed and manipulated by simply dragging the elements. The ZeptoPad image is easily transferred to a wireless PC, and if that is connected to a projector, you can give a full size presentation to large meetings from your iPhone. Your creations can also be sent by email as image files.
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