WhatTheFont Comes to iPhone

Brill cakes.

Cool beans! I use this site quite a lot for work and it will be quite handy to be able to use snaps from my iphone in a more automated fashion.

Brill cakes.

Add this to Shazam and SnapTell--my iPhone is becoming very aware of the surrounding world!

I picked this app up last night after seeing it on the AppShopper.com new apps list. It has worked well so far, at least on the larger ads, banners and flyers that I've used it on. I haven't tried smaller fonts yet, but from a graphic design perspective I'm more interested in ad or product fonts. This makes it easy for me to collect good fonts!

Perhaps I spoke too soon... hard crash of the OS on my first attempt.

Luckily, an in iPhone, that never means lost work.

EDIT: Obscure error message (with the word "Dang") on second attempt with the same image ("Time Capsule" on the product box).

Third attempt: success. Mixed but useful results--all I had to do was answer "blank" when it would try to identify each letter twice instead of once (?) and then it found the font Worth keeping on hand.

I was thinking, a while back, that this would be a great app for the WhatTheFont people to do. I'm really glad to see it hit the App Store!

I decided to try and identify the default font used in this thread, just for fun. It didn't do that well when I took a picture of the thread on the computer monitor at work, as it seemed to have some difficulty separating the letters from one another (the contrast wasn't all that great in the image, I'll admit). I then tried taking a screenshot of the thread from mobile Safari, zoomed way in to just one or two words. This time, the app was able to identify all of the individual letters, but for some reason, still not the font! Hmm.

Awesome idea, and neat execution (I love using my finger to draw a box around words). I guess we'll see how it works over time, and what updates bring to its reliability.

Take care,
Sojourn

EDIT: I tried again, with the same screenshot, but this time with a different word, and it said that the font is either Verdana, Tahoma, or Prima Sans Mono. In between attempts, it said that it wasn't able to access the fonts database -- maybe there was just a server-side update? In any case, this thing is fun.

EDIT #2: Interesting. I went and tried my original word from the screenshot again, and it identified it this time. The thing is, it wasn't able to figure out the period after the word (I had picked on at the end of a sentence); when I told the program it was a period, it couldn't identify the font, but when I left it blank and didn't suggest anything, it identified it fine. Weird, huh?

I'm starting to REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate apple's contract with AT&T. Every week a new app comes out for the iPhone and I'm stuck with the choice of not having one just because of AT&T.

Worse is even the "touch" alternative won't really work in this case. I wish they'd add a camera to the touch! (I really wish they'd just stop with the exclusive contract)

Glad I saw this though, I had never heard of WhatTheFont (always did it by eye and experience).

cool. seems interesting. not sure if i'll actually use this though

Seems like a cool app. I, personally, would pay more than 99¢ for it, but only because I'd rarely use it, if at all. However, for graphic designers, I could see them using it fairly often and be willing to pay more it.

I work in Graphic Design and constantly deal with issues between Mac and PC fonts. So I downloaded this and every time I open it I get a "Service unavaiable WTF can't seem to reach MyFonts right now. Please check your network connection." Error. I have 4 out of 5 3G bars. Do I need to be on WiFi? I mean WTF

jsquared said:

I work in Graphic Design and constantly deal with issues between Mac and PC fonts. So I downloaded this and every time I open it I get a "Service unavaiable WTF can't seem to reach MyFonts right now. Please check your network connection." Error. I have 4 out of 5 3G bars. Do I need to be on WiFi? I mean WTF

Click to expand...

Note: They misspelled "unavailable"