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myPantone

Jon Phillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:18:56 -0500

We’ll get this right out of the way: Pantone’s foray into the App Store is a success -- myPantone is slick, clever and imminently useful. But we can’t describe the killer utility of the app without first getting into the whys and hows of Pantone itself. So, color experts, please excuse the preambling primer. We just want to get newbies up to speed so that they really understand what Pantone’s iPhone app does -- and does not -- have to offer.

The app includes nine virtual Pantone fan decks that allow you to search by name or Pantone number, or browse with finger-swipes.

There’s No “Sorta” In Perfect Color-Matching
Pantone makes color-matching systems that have become essential to the world of design -- from graphic design to clothing design to furniture design and more. Because accurate color reproduction on paper, fabrics, plastic and other surfaces can be so hit-and-miss, designers often need to work within reliable, never-changing “color spaces” to ensure that the color they want to see reproduced is actually the color that is reproduced. In practical terms, this means spec’ing the relevant elements in a computer design document with a specific Pantone color code.

Let’s say you’re designing the logo for a Fortune 500 company. Hell, let’s say the logo is for a local moving company, because companies of all ambition-levels want their logos to look consistent on letterhead, outdoor signage, T-shirts, everywhere.

When it comes time to decide on a specific logo color, you open up your Pantone swatch collection -- it may take the form of a splayed-out “fan deck” or a book of perforated paper chips -- and decide on the color you want. That color has a code. For example, 636 C for a particular variant of light blue. Now, when it comes time to have your logo printed in the real world, you define the blue in your document file as Pantone 636 C, and the reproduction service will use the precise mix of inks, pigments or whatever to achieve the exact color you specified as it appears on the medium they’re printing on. In short, the Pantone color-matching system ensures that 636 C looks the same wherever it appears, be it in your Pantone fan deck, or on a business card or billboard.

So that’s how Pantone color matching works. That’s why it’s so useful. That’s why Pantone has become the leader in color standards.

All of which leads us to a little irony intrinsic to the myPantone app: It shouldn’t be used for precise color matching. Color accuracy is not what it’s all about.

myPantone: The Color Fanatic’s New Inspirational Friend
Here’s the deal: The iPhone’s screen isn’t designed for color accuracy. It’s designed for the best possible display at a small size, low price, and modest power requirements. The upshot is that even though myPantone contains virtual fan decks of nine different Pantone color libraries, a designer could never depend on the iPhone to perfectly represent how a particular myPantone color swatch will print in a real-world situation.

In this screen you get to choose which color system you want to work in. Shoot, we get inspired just seeing the covers of the virtual fan decks! But we’re geeky that way.

Of course, this is also an issue when viewing Pantone colors on regular computer displays, because even the best displays have to be precisely calibrated for the best-possible color accuracy. But the iPhone’s innate screen color accuracy isn’t anywhere close to that of, say, a 30-inch Cinema Display, nor does the iPhone have any screen calibration control -- unless you count the Brightness slider.

But, hey -- whatever. The app is a virtual goldmine of incredibly useful tools and features, for professional designers and color-minded hobbyists alike.

For starters, the app includes nine complete virtual fan decks: Formula Guide/solid coated; Formula Guide/solid uncoated; Formula Guide/solid matte; GoeGuide/coated; GoeGuide/uncoated; Fashion+Home/cotton; Fashion+Home/paper; Pastel Formula Guide/coated; and Pastel Formula Guide/uncoated. Given that individual fan decks (the ones printed on paper) start at about $60, you can see how much value this app provides, even if you just use myPantone in a casual way, like surveying color options in a conference room with colleagues. Again, you shouldn’t use the app to make final decisions on one Pantone color versus another; it’s not a replacement for printed Pantone color guides. But myPantone can provide you with a huge head start in making color decisions, thanks to its wealth of helpful features oriented around color cataloging and inspiration.

Swatch Details Like You’ve Never Seen Before
Once you’ve chosen which virtual fan deck to use, you can opt to sort it in one of two ways: with either a Visual sort (with all colors arranged chromatically, like a rainbow, from red to violet) or a Classic sort (with colors arranged according to Pantone’s own rather scientific -- and obtuse -- numerical grouping system). This sorting feature is something that’s just plain impossible to do with a paper fan deck or chip book.

With your sort decision completed, you can finger-swipe your way through the fan deck to browse for a particular swatch. Once you find a swatch that suits your fancy, you can double-tap it for a larger-version swatch that consumes most of the screen. This larger view will also give you the color’s Pantone number code, along with the color values for RGB, L*a*b* and HTML conversion. Pro designers already know the convenience of having all this info by one’s side.

The largest swatch view possible provides a large virtual color chip – just don’t assume that what you see on the iPhone is what you’ll get on printed material.

If you want to save the particular swatch for future reference, or just want to explore more possibilities with that swatch, you can drag it into your palette collection at the bottom of the screen. The app provides slots for 10 different palettes, and each palette can contain five swatches. Even better, you can view and share your palettes in a bunch of cool ways: Email it yourself or a friend; upload it to your account on Pantone’s community website; beam it to another iPhone; or view it on an assortment of virtual wallboards. You can also tap into the iPhone’s GPS to define the location where the palette was created.

With your new favorite swatch snuggled firmly in a palette, you can tap it again to bring up its Color Details—another feature that just isn’t feasible with a real-world fan deck. Color Details shows you a medium-sized image of the swatch, along with a row of its closest color neighbors in the Pantone collection. This “color neighborhood view” is perfect for narrowing down the precise shade or hue that floating around in your mind’s eye. You also get notation on which page the swatch appears in the real-world paper fan deck, and a button that lets you record a voice memo about the color.

Hit another button under Color Details, and up pops a screen of more swatches that bear contextual relevance to the one you’ve been digging into. For example, the swatches under Cross-Reference show you analogue swatches in other Pantone color systems. Blue Coral 19-4526 TPX may not have a perfect (or even close) analogue match in every system, but this cross-referencing feature will be invaluable to pro designers nonetheless.

At the top of the screen, the Color Details feature give you the other colors that surround your swatch in the fan deck. Those swatches at the bottom of the screen are simply a collection of swatches we gathered by hand.

And then there are the Harmony groupings, which use Pantone’s own mathematical algorithms to reveal traditional color-wheel harmonies (complementary, analogous, triadic, etc) applicable to your swatch. This might be the single-best feature for folks intimidated by making color choices. Whether you want to explore “matchy-matchy” (analogous color combos, like Evergreen and True Navy) or “stark contrast” (split-complementary combos, like Evergreen and Pesto set against Oxblood Red), the Harmony choices will keep you moving around the fan deck like a free-associating fool.

The mathematically driven harmony suggestion under Color Details are great for color newbies. We just wish those crazy symbols were explained somehow.

Take a Picture, Extract a Color
So far, we’ve explained how myPantone works if you’ve already found a color you’re interested in exploring. But what if you want the app to tell you which colors to explore? Enter the color extraction tool, which is rather unceremoniously labeled Image on the app interface. Here you can either snap a photo with the iPhone’s camera, or grab a photo already in your phone, and then hit Auto-Extraction to set the magic in motion. The app will digitally dig into your image, identify its five most dominant colors, and then generate the five swatches that most closely map to those dominant colors.

Auto-extraction does a pretty fair job of identifying close Pantone matches for the colors in your photos. Just be aware that the lighting conditions in which you shoot will have a profound result on extraction accuracy (see the next set of screenshots for living proof!).

This little trick presents some interesting opportunities. For professional designers, myPantone color extraction can provide close (though not perfect) information for matching elements in a photo with colors in a Pantone library. This can come in handy when, say, you want your coverline type to be filled with whatever Pantone green most closely matches the grass in your cover photograph.

Color extraction also offers benefits to the aesthetically challenged color newbie. Let’s say you want ideas for colors that will be harmonious with your particular light-blue wall paint. You can take a close-up photo of the paint, hit auto-extract, and then receive not the single color that most closely matches the paint, but a group of colors that work with the paint in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Did Pantone intend for a single color to generate four or five complementary swatches? We don’t know (more about that in a moment). But extracting multiple colors from what is ostensibly a single color is both a positive feature (because the harmonious color palette offers inspiration) and a negative feature (because these results remind us that the color extraction function is unreliable, and highly influenced by the light conditions in which photographs are shot).

The app doesn’t include any documentation on how color extraction works, and, in fact, one of myPantone’s very few faults is a lack of documentation and help screens. Pantone’s developers designed an interface that’s pretty darned intuitive, but we still encountered a number of features that deserved more explanation than, well, zero explanation.

The big field of green you see here is not a myPantone swatch. It’s a close-up photograph of the top of a Pantone Flight Stool spec’d in 15-0146 TPX. This photo was shot in poor lighting conditions. The app’s auto-extraction tool generated four color matches from an ostensibly single color, and none of the matches are 15-0146 TPX.

Here’s a wider-angle shot of the Flight Stool – we wanted to prove to you that it was indeed spec’d (and labeled!) as 15-0146 TPX. Again, Auto-Extraction couldn’t find this specific color in the photograph. But we blame hardware limitations, not Pantone.

While we really want to see documentation, help screens, and even color-theory reference materials in a version update, we really can’t fault Pantone for the app’s lack of color accuracy, either in the way it renders colors, or in its function for extracting colors (which, by the way, uses nearly the same algorithms that are employed in Pantone’s handheld Color Cue 2 extraction device, which currently sells for $249). The Pantone app developers did a stellar job in side-stepping the iPhone’s hardware limitations, and simultaneously making the best possible use of its unique hardware opportunities.

iPhone Helper Apps for Insanely Specific Scenarios

Leslie Ayers — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:06:00 -0500

Every day, life presents any number of problems that need solving—from settling bets to knowing which fish are OK to eat to remembering where the soupspoon goes in a formal table setting. Your iPhone or iPod touch can act as a digital Swiss Army knife, offering up the right tool to get you through almost any dilemma. We review and rate a collection of handy helper apps and ass-saving accessories that are sure to boost your rep as the consummate boy scout, always prepared for anything.

For Anyone Who's Ever Asked, "How?"

Howcast.com's free iPhone app puts the site's eclectic collection of how-to videos in your pocket

Think of all the things you’ve always wanted to know how to do: fold origami, set a formal dinner table, pick a lock…or maybe have sex in a car? Amazingly enough, you can learn how to do all of these things—and many more—with Howcast’s free iPhone app. This excellent freebie puts an iPhone “wrapper” on the mind-blowing array of how-to video content available on Howcast.com.

Click here to read a full review of this app

Search for topics in the search bar or tap on Most Recent or Featured to see a list of how-to videos on Howcast.

Howcast How-To Videos
Howcast Media
www.howcast.com
Free

Six More Ways to Skin a Cat (Not Literally, OK?)

These apps offer more practical solutions to real-life problems

Heads, You Win; Tails, You Win

Need to settle a bet but don’t have a coin to toss? If you spend a buck on My CoinFlip, you’ll never be without a way to force your friends to choose between two options. The app features 11 different types of coins, including a variety of euro coins.

The Vatican euro offers a nice option for your Catholic friends.

My CoinFlip 1.2.3
Sandro Stricker
www.software.sandrostricker.de
$0.99

Wait, How Many Spider Rolls Did We Order?

Ordering sushi for large parties can be an exercise in chaos—especially after a few sake rounds. Sushi Boat! presents a list of common sushi offerings—nigiri, sashimi, and maki—so you can you pass your phone around to capture a digital account of your order. When everyone’s weighed in, tap My Order to see the tally, which can then be read to the server by whoever’s most coherent.

Handy translations ensure you won't order hamachi (yellowtail) when you want maguro (tuna).

Sushi Boat! 1.0
Impresario Digital
www.impresariodigital.com
$0.99

Automatic Name That Tune

Can’t put a name to the tune that’s playing over a public speaker system or at a party? Shazam can ID the song, artist, and album—then let you buy it directly from the iTunes Store. Just tap Tag Now and hold up your iPhone so it can “hear” the music.

Shazam effortlessly recognized Len's "Steal My Sunshine," after only hearing the first couple seconds of the song, which is a bunch of talking.

Shazam 1.5
Shazam Entertainment Ltd.
www.shazam.com
Free

Wash and Wear

LaundryPal is exactly what college kids whose moms coddled them and newly divorced bachelors need: It deciphers the often mystifying care symbols found on clothes labels, ensuring that you don’t machine-wash a hand-wash or dry-clean-only item. Even better, it includes a laundry how-to, as well as tips in each symbol section (Wash, Tumble Dry, Iron, and Bleach, Dry Clean, and Dry). If only it could fold your laundry too!

The Do Not Dry symbol is presumably interchangeable with the symbol for Do Not Tumble Dry. Otherwise there will be a lot of laundry noobs walking around wearing wet—albeit clean—clothes!

LaundryPal 1.2
Hip Fire
www.hipfire.com
$0.99

You Go Green, Girl!

We debated including this, worried that the manly men out there would balk at the app’s title. This iPhone version of Sophie Uliano’s best-seller Gorgeously Green provides you with the core info from the eco-conscious lifestyle guide. What tipped the scale in the app’s favor was ultrahandy lists and tips, such as which types of fish are OK to eat, how to decode the numbers on plastic bottles, which produce you should always buy organic, and more.

Which produce should you always buy organic? The GG Survival Guide's got your back.

Gorgeously Green Survival Guide 1.2
Optima Drama
www.gorgeouslygreen.com
$0.99

Unlike Mace, It Doesn't Require a Permit

Panic Alarm is a personal alarm that can’t immobilize an attacker the way mace or pepper spray can, but could very well be all you need to scare off a would-be perp. The app consists of a large Alarm button that appears on launch, which, when tapped (or if you shake your device), sets off a very loud alarm. You can also set the app to call an emergency contact after the alarm sounds for a certain period before it’s turned off.

In the settings, designate a contact to call if the alarm goes off for a specified period without being turned off.

Panic Alarm 1.0
Adduce Studios
www.adduce.se
$0.99

Bare Bones Software WeatherCal

Susie Ochs — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:20:00 -0500

We promise not to use this to tease our friends in Wisconsin about how awful the weather is there.

Bare Bones makes some pretty impressive software we wouldn’t really call “simple”--things like professional-caliber HMTL/text editor BBEdit and ultraflexible information organizer Yojimbo. WeatherCal is not one of those. This truly, truly bare-bones utility does one thing and does it well--it adds weather forecast info from your cities of choice to iCal.

The app installs as a pane in System Preferences. From there you search for cities (by name or zip code), airports, national parks, and so on. For every location you add to your list, WeatherCal creates a new calendar in iCal that gives you the basic weather forecast for that locale. The forecasts start on the current day and stretch five days into the future--forecasts for days that already happened drop off the calendar automatically, of course.

If you double-click one of the entries in iCal, the pop-up dialog includes a URL you can click to go directly to the Weather Underground (wunderground.com) for a detailed forecast for that day and location. And of course, if you sync your iCal calendars to your iPhone or iPod touch, or with MobileMe, the WeatherCal calendars go right along.

In our tests, everything worked smoothly--setup is a no-brainer, syncing to MobileMe and to our iPhone performed properly, and we dug the little sunny/cloudy/rainy/snowy icons at the beginning of each forecast. iCal didn’t even have to be running for our MobileMe and iPhone calendars to stay in sync with the latest WeatherCal data.

Driving Kids

Susie Ochs — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:00:00 -0500

Click the parachutes in order, before they splash down.

Kids want to grow up fast, but that’s no reason to start them playing World of Warcraft at age 5. Age-appropriate MMO Driving Kids lets them cruise around a friendly city, making friends and playing games. Developer Albymedia, based in Belarus, specializes in “edutainment” software, and Driving Kids was created with the help of teachers and early-childhood development consultants. Better yet, there’s nothing to install—you can play in any Flash-enabled browser.

The game is aimed at 4- to 7-year-olds, so it’s full of bright primary colors and large flashing buttons to click. Players use the mouse to move their avatar, who starts out riding a skateboard, around the map, clicking the cartoony icons to launch minigames. A friendly robot explains the minigames’ rules out loud, so kids don’t need to know how to read to get the gist. Still, they might need someone older to interpret the instructions and point them in the right direction.

Use the colored pencils to re-create the drawing on the left.

The minigames let kids practice soft skills like pointing and clicking, recognizing patterns, matching like items, and listening to and following directions. They’ll guide a bus through a maze, match trucks and trains by color, identify matching musical tones, scoop up trash that’s polluting the ocean, complete puzzles and Memory-style games, and dump water from a helicopter to grow mushrooms to feed hedgehogs. (Yeah, don’t ask about that last one.)

While most of the minigames seem just right for the target age group, some of them were so hard, we adults had to give up: the house-building game from the Hydro Tilt level, for example. A minigame that had us tracing numerals by dragging the mouse was hampered by delayed input. And the taxi race suffered from unintuitive controls—the Up arrow always moves you forward, even if your car is pointed in the down, right, or left direction.

Players earn Auro, the in-game currency, then spend it on flashier vehicles or fancy paint jobs. What might be a trickier concept for younger kids to grasp is that the minigames also cost you Auro to play. If you pay 20 Auro as “ante” and then only earn 20 Auro with your performance, obviously you broke even. But if you quit a game in the middle, you’ll earn zero Auro and your total goes down.

Making friends in the game world—the developer says more than 10,000 users have registered.

Driving Kids has a social component too—you’ll encounter other players in the game world, and you can make friends with up to 50 of them. (No personal information is shared.) Players can chat with each other—Albymedia promises these chats are heavily moderated—and display cheerful emoticons above their avatars’ heads. A few multiplayer minigames are scattered around too, which you can only access if another Driving Kids user is there to play against you.

Mostly everything works great, except for a few glitches: A couple of times, we’d click the robot for instructions, and he wouldn’t talk to us. (Was it something we said?) And occasionally a minigame would freeze up if we clicked outside the browser window (selecting the Finder or another app) and then came back to it.

Now Hiring

Carol Pinchefsky — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:00:18 -0600

Trust us, ZIP code searches work better than city or state searches.

Now Hiring pools job listings from multiple sources, but its omissions and bugs cause more problems than they solve. While searching for "manager" jobs by ZIP code, Now Hiring accurately presented listings. But it often returned errors when manually searching for full city names. And there's no GPS or Wi-Fi location support, which seems like and obvious option.

Now Hiring also misses in its interface. We wanted a landscape mode for easier reading. And you can't delete an entire search with one button, instead needing to peck at backspace to clear the field. Worst of all, Monster.com returned thousands of hits, but Now Hiring only gave a few dozen in a similar search.

Even though it loses in quantity, Now Hiring returns unexpected listings, like those from eFinancialCareers.com and JobsinLogistics.com. But you're better off searching in other ways, given the rest of this app's issues.

AppSniper

Chris McVeigh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:54:33 -0600

Gem Spinner down 60%! This is going straight to Twitter!

Developers often game prices in the App Store, trying to generate interest by temporary sales. AppSniper plays right along, tracking these costs to find the best time to buy an app.

The ingenious utility lists all items with slashed prices (and the percentage of the price cut) within the last three days. The list of sale-priced items can be lengthy, but happily, you can shorten it by omitting your choice of genres. Tap any item to see the full description of the app along with screenshots and historical price data; you'll also find a buy button that whisks you off to the App Store so you can make the purchase.

AppSniper’s coolest feature is that it lets you "snipe" an app that you feel is overpriced. You can set an ideal buying price so AppSniper watches for sales; as soon as the price meets your expectations, AppSniper will let you know. The only drawback is that the app can't manually email you when the price changes; you have to manually launch it on a regular basis.

Food Additives

Carol Pinchefsky — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:30:31 -0600

The EU and Australia do not approve this message.

If you had a fast-food donut for breakfast, and millions have, you may not realize that nestled within the warm, rich taste of donut-y goodness are flour, oil, sugar… and propylene glycol. Propy-huh? With Food Additives, you can translate what that means to in plain English. And the results aren't pleasant. Food Additives says this additive isn't approved for consumption in the European Union and Australia. A synthetic product based on oil--crude, not olive--propylene glycol can cause eczema in high concentrations.

Do you really need this information before you've had your coffee? For people with sensitivities and other restrictions--celiac disease, a kosher or vegan diet--the answer is absolutely, positively yes.

Food Additives is an informative app that breaks over 450 food additives down into categories, such as number code, name, risk level, and whether it's derived from animals and insects. The app also lists symptoms that these additives cause, such as migraines and, eek, potential genetic mutations.

With enough erythrosine, I shall become Queen of the Mutants!

For some, Additives is essential. But is it accurate? The data comes from multiple, public sources according to the developer, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission. Although these sources are official, they're also conflicting; what's considered safe in Australia might not be safe in America and vice versa. So even with the app, you still have to determine which ingredient makes you reshelf those crackers.

Also, the caveats are a little too heavy-handed. Now that we've been warned against a potential asthmatic reaction from Aspertame, diet Snapple won't ever taste the same again.

iPhone: The Missing Manual

Chris McVeigh — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:22:32 -0600

A no-frills presentation still packs good information.

iPhone: The Missing Manual is a portable, app version of David Pogue's book of the same name. He presents information in a friendly way, softening the edges of the technology for those who might find it daunting. The content is geared towards green users (think: your dad learning how to zoom in Safari), though the book covers more complex fare like creating ringtones in GarageBand.

The book-reading interface works well. Taps on the screen sides move back and forth through pages, while a tap to the center calls up a toolbar to access chapters, searches, and settings. These settings control over the book's font, letting you change its color, alignment, spacing, and size. You can also change the default font, but we experienced a persistent crash each time we tried to scroll through available typefaces. No matter--with the capacity to search by keyword, jump between chapters and fit in your pocket, this app easily one-ups the paperback.