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.

Okay, so you have to go to this wedding because you are the “plus one.” So rather than simply write it off as a half a day loss that you’ll never get back, you can improve your situation and earn some relationship “bank” in the process by deciding to engage.

This is just the kind of thing that the “Good With Faces” app is designed for! You can do some searches online and with a little help from your significant other, build a quick set of notes on the entire wedding party. We have created a mock-up for you to see, here:

Then you take GWF with you to the affair and you will be able to recognize the Mother of the Bride on sight and know
her name is Julie Sherman and her favorite color is blue; you will be able to glance at your phone and say to the Father of the Bride, “Hey Jim, Shana’s told me so much about you. I hear you love Gibson guitars.”

And… you’re off. Instead of a wasted day, you have a shot at having a good time, your love will appreciate that you did this for him/her and you might make some new friends. No one is going expect anyone to go through the rigor of memorizing an entire wedding party but with GWF, sometimes all it takes is just a little knowledge at just the right moment and things can change in big ways.

Also, to complement the Guest List view, we have the Grid view designed to let you see more photos at once for those times when you will be able to recognize someone visually first. It’s a subtle thing but the photos are slightly separated from each other against a black backdrop to help the eye to focus on each image without getting overloaded. This can really speed things up when you are just scanning the crowd; you might see someone and wonder who they are.

Grid view works just like List view in simply that touching an entry takes you to the Detail view. Now, you do not have to fill in every field, only what you decide you want.

However, in this example, we can see that sometimes it is not only good to know who someone is but to have a little sage advice can save you from a veritable host of problems.

A classic example we will look at is shopping for furniture but there are lots of other similar examples that work just as well; another might be helping a girlfriend look for the perfect set of earrings.

Now imagine that you decide to shop for furniture over the weekend, after a couple days of furniture shopping you have been to a dozen or more places and Sunday evening rolls around and you are exhausted. You are still thinking about what you saw and then you say, “You know, I really loved that end table.” And then you say, “… but where was that! The past couple of days are just a blur to me now.”

Fortunately, you thought to use GWF for your furniture hunting and you have made quite an impromptu catalog of your shopping trip. Now, you have a listing of all the things you looked at and took a few quick notes and let the app do the rest for you.

you can just do a quick scan of the images in grid mode…

Once you spot the table, it couldn’t be easier to find the end table and look at the GPS location on the map; now you know where you were when you saw it! In fact, even if you didn’t write the name of the store down, zooming in on the map will show names of most of the local stores. Could it be any easier?

Lots of cities offer walking tours that can be exhausting but worth it; this works whether you are on vacation or a native. This shot below shows an example of a very busy day that you will want to be able to revisit afterward while chilling out in some classy hotel lounge. These things tend to be very hectic and it’s often left until later to go over what you did and where you did it.