You could let your conscience be your guide, but that doesn't sound like very much fun at all. Plus LA Weekly's new and improved Smartphone app is going to do a much better job, especially since it's just been technologically bedazzled and is now ready for your downloading and upgrading pleasure.

Wherever you are and whatever you're into, you'll find something within the app that you can use right now. With just a few thumb swipes, you can:

• See up-to-the-minute content from all our blogs (which include news, arts, music and food)
• Instantly find restaurants and bars near you, searchable by cuisine type and neighborhood
• Check out event listings and concert calendars searchable by date, artist, neighborhood, venue or genre
• See editors' picks of the best things to do, and reviews from our writers
• Peep slideshows of local nightlife, concerts and events
• Get access to our money-saving Daily Deals.

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For those of us who have spent WAY too much time lost near the Burbank airport, driving down one street or another in the concrete tangle of one-way streets chasing Bob Hope's ghost, searching, often in vain, for Rocio Camacho's latest mole palace and maybe a stack of bright green tortillas made in the tortillaria next door, lost in Sun Valley, wherever and whatever that is, desperately hungry -- finally there's an app for this existential and gastronomical condition.

Rocio's Mole de los Dioses has debuted their app, a simple yet utterly necessary (for some of us) iPhone and iPad app that not only tells you the restaurant's location and hours, but allows you to order that mole de los dioses (number 6 on our list of 100 favorite dishes of 2012), or whatever else you want from the menu. You can order stuff, pay for it, view past orders, log-in via Facebook, whatever makes you happy. Best of all, you can find the place and not end up driving around near some runway, faint from hunger. Your occupational hazard joke here: __________.

Screen shot of the Chefs Feed app

Chefs Feed, the app that launched a little less than a year ago, released version 2.0 today with a bunch of new cities and more social media interaction capabilities.

Chefs Feed aims to do much the same thing as our Where the Chefs Eat posts aspire to -- that is, let the food professionals guide you to the places they love to eat. It also aims to act as an alternative to Yelp and other ratings sites -- here, you can follow a chef you trust rather than the anonymous masses. The app points you in the direction of specific dishes rather than just send you to a restaurant, and allows you to search by dish and location. Hungry for a sandwich in Hollywood? Theoretically, the app should help you find a few that different chefs recommend.

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Urbanspoon screenshot

Online reservations, especially ones you can make using your phone, are pretty darn convenient. There are a ton of companies that offer this service, although Open Table pretty much owns the bulk of the market. But yesterday Urbanspoon launched a new service through its Rezbook function, which allows you to see what tables are available right now. And for some strange reason, they've called it Right Now.

The app allows you to see open tables around town, and to find out how long the wait is at restaurants with no open tables, even at places that don't take reservations. Urbanspoon is billing it as a convenience for diners who aren't planners, but also a great tool for restaurants to let prospective diners know they have tables available. In a nice marketing coup for the occasion, the James Beard Foundation has switched all its reservations over to the Urbanspoon system, including those for the yearly gala (good luck getting a Right Now table at that).

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If you go out to dinner a lot, with groups of friends or colleagues or random people you meet in bars or at food blogger camps or even IACP award dinners, you may run across the occasional math problem when it comes to divvying up the check. Making soufflés and conching chocolate being easier for some people than long division. This is particularly true if there are individual caveats, like somebody who always orders the foie supplement, or somebody else who doesn't drink. Because haggling over the check can sometimes be as unseemly as, oh I don't know, live-tweeting your dinner, this can get awkward. Fortunately, there's an app for this.

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The USDA says 91% of U.S. farms are classified as small, usually family-run businesses, grossing less than $250,000 a year. That's a lot of local food production run on a shoestring budget, if any at all, with little to no access to customers outside of direct sales at a farmers market.

Then there are local, seasonal eaters looking for close-to-home farms, community-supported agriculture or local farmers market locations and schedules. Finding one unified, regularly updated and easy-to-reference source that connects you with nearby farmers no matter where you are in the country has been the stuff of dreams. It's also a seemingly Sisyphean task when you consider that the aforementioned 91% drops by an estimated 300-plus farms each week.

The Locavore app -- a project of Local Dirt founder Heather Hilleren -- achieves what was previously thought impossible: a seamless, well-managed and thorough app connected to a network of more than 35,000 farmers. They even get the local "what's in season" info right, down to the number of weeks left in the season, customized to your GPS-identified location. It seemed too good to be true, enough that we ran it through a serious obstacle course trying to find something wrong with it. What we found, after the jump.

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Tweet-a-Beer

At South by Southwest last week, Fiona Apple took the stage outside of L.A. for the first time in five years. Bruce Springsteen referenced "blue balls" in his keynote speech. In other news, the Tweet-a-Beer Twitter app also made its official debut, which is fitting considering many SXSW attendees spend more time pounding oat sodas than actually seeking out new music.

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We've all wished we could carry Anthony Bourdain around in our pockets when traveling to a new city, and now, the marketing geniuses over at the Travel Channel have figured out a way to make such a thing possible. In digital form, at least. Today they announced the new "Travel Channel Layover Guide With Anthony Bourdain" app for iPhone and iPad. (Sorry Droid and BlackBerry users, once again.)

Predictably, the app mimics the first season of his show The Layover, in which the Bourdain camp set out to help viewers avoid tourist traps in various world cities in favor of more fun and interesting local haunts. Bourdain didn't restrict his advice to just restaurant recommendations, though the show, and the app, include plenty of those.

For the moment, the Layover app features only the cities visited during season one, so if you happen to be visiting Singapore, Rome, Amsterdam, London, Montreal or Hong Kong in the near future, it's particularly worth your $1.99 to download. However, New York, Miami, San Francisco and, thankfully, Los Angeles, are also on the list.

As for Tony's L.A. recommendations:

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R.E. via the Squid Ink Flickr Pool

Ramen

Where were you on Valentine's Day? Did you go out? Did you stay home? Hit up a bar? While many of us were gorging on sushi or checking out the amazing Lauryn Hill concert, others were partying it up at the Key Club, or following our advice and getting "romantical" at LudoBites.

For those of you who use Foursquare -- the smartphone game that lets you check in to venues for points, bragging rights and the occasional cool deal -- we already know where you were.

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"Know What"

Images of app

The Computer Age. The Digital Revolution. The Information Era. Many also say it's the Food Age. We're bombarded by facts and opinions on how, what and where to eat. How to choose? That's where technology helps by putting ideas into our hands, literally. More and more, travel and food guides are looking not only to the Web to share tips but also, of course, to apps. Examples include Zagat, Yelp and Urbanspoon. And hey, even LA Weekly.

Know What, an L.A. and San Francisco travel guide with plenty of food and drink ideas, is the newest to sidestep books and websites in favor of the app. Unlike other food guides we've written about recently, it doesn't focus on one specific slant. (Clean Plates lists what it deems healthy, sustainable options, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center National Diners' Guide considers labor practices.) Instead, "Know What" gives a variety of slants, each presented as an app-within-an-app. It's geared for locals and tourists alike.

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