Designers tend to pride themselves on their ability to name a random font, but every now and then a font will come along that can stump even the best know-it-all.

Well fear no more, as myfonts.com has brought out an iPhone app that will save your reputation – WhatTheFont.

WhatTheFont allows you to take a photo of any font, whether it be in a magazine or a web graphic, upload the image to the MyFonts server and in seconds have the correct font identified.

Best of all, WhatTheFont is free. Give it a try, it could get you out of a typography emergency.

One of the handy built in features of OS X (Leopard) is Quick Look. It has built in plug-ins to view PDF files, images etc. without needing to open the application. That's fine if your only using the apps that Apple ships it with, or makes - but everything else needs a plug-in.

I was disappointed that such a neat feature couldn't be put to better use for times when you don't really want to open the inDesign file 5 versions back just to see which one had the blue cover, or the illustrator file that had the correct logo colours - even though the last person who used it may have named it incorrectly!

It is relatively cheap at $20 USD and can be a real time saver when it comes down to deadline. It has some neat features such as being able to view the preview with various colour backgrounds, shows the fonts and colours used in the document, along with creation/modification dates. You can also open the document directly from Quick Look.

You can edit settings so that preview uses the document header file included, or it can build its own, ignoring files over a certain size - if you had to wait that long you would just open the document!