In my spare time, I like to come up with a line of more unusual apps for the iphone. Whenever the Mac commercial advertising available apps airs, I counter their practical (and nonsensical) offerings with my own. Here’s a sampling of my absurd iphone apps. “Your kids won’t talk to you? There’s an app for that.” “Earwax buildup? There’s an app for that.” “First date going poorly? There’s an app for that.” It was only a matter of time before style-savvy iphone users got their own A+D apps. Just a few months before their showing at IIDEX/NeoCon Canada 2009, paint giant Sherwin-Williams released their own app known as ColorSnap.

ColorSnap. Designed by Sherwin-Williams.

This FREE (yes, free) application allows you to snap a picture of anything—a bird’s feather, a palm tree, a rusted piece of scrap metal—and then use your finger to scroll around the image until you pinpoint the color you like, at which point ColorSnap will match the hue and bring up its closest Sherwin-Williams swatch, along with a coordinating palette of paints. You can also use ColorSnap to find your local Sherwin-Williams store, save favorites to a “My Saved Colors” library, and get detailed breakdowns such as RGB. At the itunes store, reviewers have sung the praises of ColorSnap—even though one such writer used the app to match the purple of Disneyland’s castle at dusk. But surely the ColorSnap app should not be judged by the damage those with bad taste might do using its features.

Instead, consider the good. I can find the exact paint color to match my chocolate lab’s coat—something I tried to do three years ago by bringing her into the local hardware store (the technology at the time did not work with fur). My mother-in-law could finally match the color of her bromeliads, and my brother could match the color of his favorite antique tricycle. My wife would probably want to match the color of our retired sled dog’s blue eyes—which resemble glaciers agleam beneath the Northern Lights. ColorSnap is a tribute to whatever you find most beautiful. The free app offered by Sherwin-Williams could only be improved via The Jetsons’ technology—say, if I matched my favorite color and then drove home to find the room had already been painted by generous-minded robots!