WhatTheFont is a font identifying app for the iphone. The basic idea is

to snap a picture of the font you are trying to figure out and let app

do the rest. Pictures are taken, uploaded and then analyzed by the

program. The user then is shown pieces of the photo each trying to

identify a different character. Once the characters have been

identified, the user can click submit and the app will list suggestions

for you.

When this app did work, it worked great. It offered dead on

suggestions that really were useful in showing me a font. But with the

limitations of the iphone's 2-megapixel camera that lacks an

auto-focus, blurry text became a hassle for this program and almost

rendered it useless in day to day situations. Small text was nearly

impossible for the app to recognize as it was too blurry for the app to

analyze. This only seemed to work on fonts that were extremely large

and worked usually on only one or two characters at a time.

At the time

of this review, WhatTheFont was available free from the app store. It's

definitely an interesting concept and would prove useful to designers

and typographers alike if it would work frequently. But in my tests,

the app failed to identify most of my text and was too much of a hassle

when it did. It'd be quicker to start memorizing the types of fonts

than to get this app to do it for you.