Dale Gardner

Geotagging--adding data to a photo that reveals the location it was taken--has quite literally added a new dimension to enjoying and sharing photography. Online photo-sharing sites have added mapping capabilities, and iPhoto '09 and other apps have made it simple to show when and where a prized photo was taken.

But for many, technology has lagged--few cameras today offer the requisite GPS support, and add-on units are expensive. But if you have an iPhone, you can start tagging photos with the help of an inexpensive application. We'll help you pick the right one.

As amateur photographers grow in skill and move to more sophisticated cameras, one of the challenges they face is learning how to control depth of field. Depth of field--the portion of a scene that appears sharp and in focus--is a critical element in artistic control and the quality of a photograph.

By controlling depth of field, for example, photographers can throw a distracting background into a blur, while keeping a subject's face in sharp focus. But since most point-and-shoot cameras automatically optimize the depth of field for a given situation, new SLR photographers can be in for unwelcome surprises, even during routine shoots.

As the amount of storage they provide expands, iPhones and iPod touches have become increasingly useful as a temporary location to stash documents, images, and videos. Rather than fumble around for an easy-to-lose USB flash drive or pay for a small portable disk drive, why not just use the storage you already have and that you take with you on the go?

FileAid, a free program from DigiDNA, is one of a number of programs designed to satisfy that desire. While the application offers some nice touches, technical issues make it an unattractive choice.

If you dance--anywhere from a rave to your junior prom--you've seen it. The music is loud, the lights are low. Dancers are moving in time to a hypnotic beat. Suddenly, the spell is broken as movements become disjoint and jerky. What happened? The music changed--and, as it did, so did the beat. Suddenly missing their reference point, dancers have to work to reestablish their mental and physical connection to the music.

That's why DJs, especially ones spinning at a club or dance, will take pains to ensure their set delivers a consistent beat. Dancers can then slip effortlessly from one song to the next. But just how to determine which songs match up?

With more than 7 million individuals participating in online meetings every month, the Web-based meeting facilities provided by Cisco WebEx (plus uncounted others served up by competitors) have become a ubiquitous means of quickly sharing information when you can't be there in person. Services like WebEx were pioneered a decade ago and, until recently, were limited to Windows users. Support for other operating systems--most notably, Apple's Mac OS X--has since been introduced, but participation in sessions has always required access to a computer. No PC? That meant listening to other people talk about the presentation or graphics driving the session--rarely productive, and almost never satisfying.

With Cisco WebEx Meeting Center for iPhone, all of that has changed. Cisco earns high marks for the vision and effort associated with bringing the WebEx experience to the iPhone. And a recent update to the app has resolved most of the limitations of the original version, delivering a nearly perfect solution.

Ever meet one of those amazing people with a photographic memory? An almost frightening recall of facts and figures, places and dates? Ready to launch into a detailed reconstruction of events long past at the drop of a hat?

Didn't think so.

Struggling to complete a project, but distracted and distressed by noise? There's always the Fortress of Solitude, but that's too far to go. The Cone of Silence never seemed to work that well. And who really has ready access to an isolated sound-proof booth?

SoundCurtain from FutureAcoustic may be just the tool you need to banish distracting noise while focusing on the task at hand.

With more than 36 million members, LinkedIn is the premier business networking site, perfect for keeping in touch with colleagues, networking, finding--or filling--a job, participating in discussions, and much more. Unfortunately, LinkedIn for the iPhone and iPod touch allows easy access to only a subset of the service's functionality. And glitches with performance and stability will leave most users yearning for an update to the application.

Much of the value of LinkedIn's service comes from its ability to navigate the relationships between you, your connections, and other individuals. Need to connect with a company executive to pitch a business proposition? On the LinkedIn Web site, you simply search for individuals--using their name, title, past and present company affiliations, or other attributes. After you've identified the person you want to contact, LinkedIn will point out your connections who have a relationship with the individual. You can request your connections to introduce you to the individual through a referral, or you can contact them directly via InMail, a LinkedIn messaging service that protects the recipient's privacy.

Let's say you need to call Aunt Celeste in Sydney--is she awake? Or perhaps your boss has handed you a hot lead from Lapland--will anyone be in the office to take your call? Darkness from Bjango, now available in an updated 2.0 release, answers these questions with a distinctive style, adding unique features not available in the default iPhone world clock application.

Like the default app, Darkness displays a customizable list of world cities along with the local time and date. But the similarity ends there--Darkness adds the time of sunrise and sunset, and a colorful icon reveals the sun's relative position in the sky. Selecting a specific city delivers the time of sunrise, transit, and sunset; moon rise and set times; the hours and minutes of daylight; and the times of dawn and dusk, based on civil, aeronautical, and astronomical measures.

Regardless of whether you're striving to wring the last bit of productivity from your iPhone--or are simply organizationally challenged--inTouch Contacts promises to bring order to your expanding Contacts database. While developer Objects Etc offers a sophisticated vision of how to achieve that goal in this US$5 app, a number of limitations and cumbersome features mark inTouch Contacts as merely an interesting first effort.

inTouch Contacts links to your existing Contacts database, providing a view of--and the option to edit--existing individuals and companies. Inconveniently, you can't create new records, so adding a person or company requires the native Contacts application. inTouch Contacts provides better support for Contacts' Group records. You can import existing records into inTouch, create new Groups, and then export them back to the native database.

Popular folklore tells us Abraham Lincoln wrote his historic Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. Today's orators wouldn't be caught with such unsophisticated tools, preferring complex and expensive TelePrompTers that let them appear to speak extemporaneously. With AutoCue from Softalk, you can join presidents and prime ministers with your own prompter, right in the palm of your hand.

AutoCue provides a simple and easy-to-use prompter which scrolls the text of your speech or notes, allowing you to stay on track with your iPhone or iPod touch. You can write speeches using AutoCue's built-in editor. A faster--and easier option--is to create a text file and upload it to your iPhone using a Web browser, the Finder, or a Network Drive in Windows.

For business travelers, expenses are, well, expensive, both in terms of money and time. There's time spent tracking down receipts, preparing and filing reports, and eating out-of-pocket costs for expenses you forget to file. So experienced travelers are always on the search for a tool that will simplify and speed up the task. BriteMac's JetSet Expenses offers a thorough solution for iPhone and iPod touch users.

With JetSet, adding up expenses can be handled quickly. Touch the add button and you'll see icons representing 15 different expense categories--airfare, hotels, meals, tips, and more. While recording details, you can use the iPhone's built-in camera to capture an image of a receipt. Given the image quality provided by the camera, this feature is probably not as useful as you'd hope.