Another product announced at Macworld Expo, Extensis Universal Type Server, is now shipping. Universal Type Server is designed for corporate font management, requiring Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server 10.4 or 10.5 on a G5 or better machine. My personal opinion is that this would be a perfect application to run on a headless Mac mini.

There are two flavors of Universal Type Server - Professional, which is scalable to any size workgroup, and Lite, for workgroups of up to 10 users. The server and client applications are cross-platform, running on Windows as well as Mac.

Migration paths are available for users of Font Reserve Server or Suitcase Server. The Lite package is available for $1395 directly from Extensis, but you'll want to contact a reseller for the Professional version. If you want to kick the tires before you buy, you can download 30-day free trials for both Pro and Lite.

PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.

PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple's Character Palette tool, but it's slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.

PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a "cubic meters" symbol in Helvetica. Typing in "cub" produces no results, but you can click a new "All" button to search across all Unicode fonts.

You can download a trial version of PopChar X 4.0, or purchase it online from Ergonis for €29.99. Multiple license packs are available at a discount.

We had a quick visit with Kelly from Extensis and a demo of Extensis Universal Type Server, an upcoming workgroup management package for fonts. Administrators can control font sets and lock down user preferences, including for mobile users, and both server and client are cross-platform, Leopard and Vista friendly. Pricing not yet established, but the product should be shipping later this year. Video after the jump.

After we posted that neon Apple sign a little while back, reader Franco thought we'd get a kick out of this Apple flag for sale on eBay, and he was right. The best news is that right now, it's sitting pretty at only $10 (reserve not yet met, though) flying upwards-- what are you TUAW readers, rich?-- so you could own a little piece of Apple history for cheap.

As for dating it, the page says the 80s. No mention of Macintosh might put it before 1984, but that's just a guess-- Apple IIs were known as the first "personal computers" and those were made all the way up until the early 1990s. I really love those fonts, though, and of course the rainbow logo is a classic.

One of the first things users noticed about the new Safari for Windows beta is that Apple is using their own font smoothing technology (found in OS X) instead of the Windows standard ClearType. Joel Spolsky has an interesting discussion of the different approaches Apple and Microsoft use with respect to sub-pixel font smoothing. Basically his conclusion is that Apple, coming from a desktop publishing background, "believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible" even if that means some onscreen blurriness, whereas Microsoft sacrifices letter shape "to prevent blur and improve readability." Joel notes that it's not entirely obvious which is the superior way of doing things, though predictably Mac users prefer the Apple way and Windows users the prefer the Microsoft way. In the end, however, this is likely as much a result of familiarity as anything else.

For my part, I've always thought the Mac way of doing text just looked right. Thanks to Joel I now understand why; definitely worth a read.

[via Red Sweater Blog]

Continuing our new The Little Things series that highlights the often-overlooked polish and underrated features that make Mac OS X such a joy to use, I thought I'd highlight one of those 'guy behind the guy' features that makes Apple's OS so gorgeous: font anti-aliasing. Nerdy, I know, but check out the screenshot: Windows, even XP, doesn't support this feature system-wide like Mac OS X does, and it shows. Type looks like garbage in everything from desktop icons to most applications and their menus on Windows. Mac OS X, on the other hand, supports anti-aliased fonts from the ground up (to my knowledge), so everything from System Preferences to desktop icons, text editors to iLife and more are incredibly legible and lickable.

Some call it a minor detail, but given the undeniably pleasant usability this brings to the OS, I would argue it's one of those trademark additions that Apple's engineers don't receive enough credit for.

Update: As many people pointed out Windows does, in fact, have a similar feature called 'ClearType,' which some consider superior to OS X's (though it is a matter of taste). The key difference is that ClearType is disabled by default, which in effect means that most Windows users have no idea that it is even an option. Another case of Apple paying attention to the little details, though Vista will have this feature enabled by default.

CSS Tweak!, as you might imagine, can optimize and clean up your CSS code with the drag and drop of a file. The widget will report how much smaller your file is going to get, and its description states that your new file is "saved in the same location as the original", so I'm pretty sure this means it doesn't overwrite the original, but proceed (and backup!) with caution.

CSS Tweak! appears to be free and is available from Andy Peatling at his site, CssDev.

This is one of those widgets that makes me wonder why Apple hasn't already made one. Type Cast is pretty simple and straight-forward: it's a font preview widget from Code Line Communications, makers of Art Director's Toolkit (amongst other things). This widget isn't short on capabilities either; you can navigate font families, styles and sizes with merely your keyboard, and you can even be taken directly to the font file in the Finder.

The Type Cast widget is free and available from Code Line Communications here.

Code Line Communicators, developers of Art Director's Toolkit, has developed a handy widget for easy-access to some of the tools and features of their app right within your Dashboard. However, the widget only comes with a copy of Art Director's Toolkit 5; the latest version which I don't believe is bundled with Macs just yet.

Either way, this widget definitely pulls its weight, as it can "Search through thousands of color swatches in industry-standard libraries, view characters and keyboard equivalents of fonts, sample colors on-screen, convert fractions/decimals/units of measure, calculate file sizes, and much more."

While the widget is listed at Apple's Dashboard download site, the link simply points to the latest version of Art Director's Toolkit.

Typographica, a journal of typography, is listing their favorite fonts of 2005 in a two part series. If you're anything like me you have a number of fonts littering your Mac that you have accumulated from various websites.

Typographica gives the nod to Liboa, Freight, Ministry Script, Garamond Premier Pro, Deréon, Promixa Nova (my favorite of the bunch), Zingha, Vista Sans, Cézanne Pro, FF Maiola, Maple, Garda, Litteratra, and Relato. Keep in mind that this is just part one, people. Read the post to get the details and see samples of all the fonts.

What is your favorite font? I have a soft spot for Rockwell, myself.

We've mentioned the most excellent (and free) Linotype FontExplorer X here before, and I figured its most recent update was worth a mention. A host of new features, updates and bug fixes have been issued including: Illustrator CS/CS2 plug-ins, copying to clipboard from the font preview will copy sample images, new Keynote support and Pages scanning, fixed multiple font deactivation, fixed crash on import of corrupt fonts and much more.

If you're on the hunt for better font management than OS X's built-in Font Book (who isn't?) that's in the range of "free" and you haven't picked up a copy of Linotype FontExplorer X, you really ought to either kick yourself or, as a better choice, download a copy and get crackin'.