Beta Beat: Fontcase

Trying it out. There are pros and cons. I definitely like the ability to tag and its ability to smartly pull specific metadata from the fonts themselves (designer, etc. -- I see foundry listed in the sources column, but it hasn't pulled this from any fonts I've been testing)

The biggest downside is that it copies your fonts into its own library rather than working from where they already are. Let's say you have 2GB of fonts: they now take up 4GB of space on your disk.

I suppose you could delete them from the original location, but I'm not adventurous enough to test that on my production machine yet.

If deleting them from the original location is even possible, there's one more problem: The Fontcase Library vault is an opaque bundle file. Files in Fontcase's bundle do not show up in Spotlight searches and the bundle file itself has no internal organization other than the family names. These things mean that this app just isn't suitable for any serious use. Being able to find and access the files directly in the computer's file system is important, particularly when collaborating.

Another (less important) issue: The waterfall needs more than three sizes and should be resizable -- the resize slider in the interface changes only the size preview "icons," which aren't nearly as useful as samples that use more glyphs than those in the font's name.

Let's hope the shortcomings are beta-specific.

how in the hell is this a beautiful interface? are you too blinded to see that it's just ugly gray next to ugly gray?

Can anyone confirm how this works compared to LinoType's FE X? And how it holds up against 30.000+ fonts?

How is this going to replace the font book native to OS X? Even if I have this installed won't Font Book from Apple pop up everytime I click on the Text area in an apps Inspector?

I would think that a 3rd party replacement would have to have a mini mode of some sort so that it doesn't take up too much screen real estate.

I'd rather have the five dozen liquor jugs.

Call me ignorant, but can anyone tell me what the point of an application like this is? I don't quite see why anyone would need it.

This app certainly looks the part - does anyone have an idea of pricing yet?

Thanks for the review - I've been looking forward to Fontcase for quite a while now, and am now relieved that it might not have been for me anyway.

When I recently bought a new Glossybook Pro, I decided to do a complete clean install. For testing purposes, I installed Suitcase Fusion 2 instead of FontAgent Pro, which I'd be using for a few years. While Fusion's auto-activation of fonts is not yet up to FAP standard (e.g. Flash CS4 is somewhat unpredictable), it is very fast, and not having dozens of shared library files also make it feel "cleaner".

I am a HUGE fan of Linotype's Font Explorer X. So I'm interested to see how this compares.

Christina, you shouldn't use an "an" before UI. The use of "an" is determined by pronunciation rather than spelling. UI, whether said as a word (yoo-ee), or as an acronym "U-I," or as the expansion, "user interface," would be preceded by "a," not "an." Hence, we say, "an hour," although "h" is a consonant.