Did you know that Siri Dictation works in GWF? Well, if you love being able to quickly take a quick photo, you are gonna love using dictation! The best part is that it works really well and is available when you are working with Events and when you are creating or modifying your Guests. It works like this; when you are entering a typing field and it calls up the keyboard, if you look more closely at the keyboard, you will see a little microphone key (as shown in the image). At this point, tapping that button pulls up Siri at the bottom of the screen and as you speak, ‘she’ will type it out for you into the field.

Note that for the detail field of Guests, you can stop and pause and start talking again and Siri will wait for you! Don’t think that you have to quickly be able to say everything you want to say in a long, unbroken statement; it’s better than that.

Obviously, professionals might use specialized equipment but if you are an amateur Archaeologist, Botanist or even a Park Ranger, being able to quickly catalog things you see in the outdoors could be very useful. Note that some iPhones can now be used underwater, which might give you some excellent shots.

Some other potential uses might be camping and hiking; as long as you can still get a signal, your location capture should work. However, even if it doesn’t, you can turn on dictation for the free text field and describe where you are. Boat, bus, and wagon trips, etc. could be particularly nice as you spend time standing and/or sitting in one location while the vessel moves you around; it might be nice to be able to check those out later.

When you find yourself in a situation where you want to make a number of Guest entries quickly and you only care about the photo, to get things started; there’s a way to do that. The first thing you will want to do is set your configuration to prefer photos.

…this way, every time you create a new Guest, it will automatically call up the camera so you can take a picture, right away.

Many of you may know this much already but you might not have considered is that once you have taken the photo, you can simply hit the button to “Keep the Changes.”

This is because, only Events require titles, Guests have no required text fields at all, so if all you want is a photo, a time stamp and the location, hit “Keep the Changes” and you’re done. Of course, you can always go back later and type something later; you might know what you want to type by looking at the photo.

The technique for getting good results when using your phone to take a photo of a computer screen can be harder than you might think. Sure, it’s easy enough if you don’t care what it looks like, but if that photo is going to be used in GWF, it will be reduced and be shown in small sizes in a number of places. This can make it hard to recognize what you took a picture of if you are relying recognizing the photo later.

So, to begin with, the cameras in phones have a minimum distance they have to be from something before they can focus and without that, it’s just fuzzy. If you are simply too close to the screen (or anything else for that matter), you will simply get a blurry, out of focus, image like this. Notice that besides being blurry, the color is not good.

Here, you can see in a shot of the website banner that we are still too close at around four inches. Being so close to the screen creates unsightly blemishes and patterns in the image; at least the color is a better.

Next, we back out to around 8 inches and used the phone’s zoom to make the image fill the frame better. The blemishes are there but the unsightly patterns are mostly gone leaving regular pattern that is somewhat easier to look at because it distracts a bit less from the image.

And finally, the best result came at around 12 inches, combined with the zoom on the camera; these two features combine to let the individual pixels on the screen to blend in a pleasing way giving you a surprisingly good image. If this was a photo of a person, you might never know it was taken by shooting a computer screen.

It’s also worth mentioning that after you shoot the photo, you can zoom in and move it a bit to position it better in the frame. In the last shot, I did a bit of that as well to get a decent framing of the image.