Fontcase released. Typographical awesomeness for everyone!

by Milind Alvares
Wednesday January 21, 2009

Fontcase released. Typographical awesomeness for everyone!

by Milind Alvares on January 21, 2009

Bohemian Coding’s Fontcase, has finally hit the shelves. The awesome font manager was in a private beta earlier, which Phil took for a spin. He had only good words to say about this excellent font manager.

Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you organise the fonts you have installed on your system. Designed to be an iPhoto for your fonts, Fontcase has a powerful tagging system, which is designed to let you control your fonts like you control your music.

fontcase-press-release

The final version is even better than the preview that was reviewed. Apart from the mindblowing user interface (I just can’t stop can I?), The developer (I’m in a confused state as to whether it is Laurent Baumann or Pieter Omvlee) added a bunch of features that blows the competition out of the font pit. Note that we haven’t reviewed the final app, so we’re basicall taking the dev’s word for it.

Advanced font activation
Hopefully, this will work as advertised. You can even preview unactivated fonts, and activations instantly show up in your applications.

Bonjour Sharing
You can now share your fonts with other people just like iTunes pioneered this for music. There’s one big difference: Fontcase let’s you preview, then download fonts from shared libraries. A company no longer needs a centralized server to distribute new fonts through, it’s all built into Fontcase. How great is this!

fontcase-bonjour-sharing

Detailed Glyph examination
This feature will definitely turn on those fontphyles. Take a look at the nitty gritty details in each glyph of a font, complete with gridwork and everything.

Font Printing
Sure, Font Book has some printing options, but take a look at this and it will blow your mind (I know, I must stop now).

printing-fontcase

Font comparison
Phil talked about this in the preview, and it is definitely one of those killer features.

Many would say this is a downer, but I think Fontcase is very decently priced at €35 ($46) at launch. It will however be raised to €42 ($55) whenever the dev decides to pull the plug on the discount. You can of course get yourself a trial for this app to see for yourself before you jump in.

Tagged as: font book, fontbook, fontcase, mac, News, press release

Reader Comments

Font Explorer X Pro vs FontCase | Spigot Design: February 13, 2009 at 6:29 am

Reader Comments

Rob January 21, 2009 at 9:29 am: I used the trial version, and while impressive, I don’t feel the price is justified. If I was in a design business, the cost might be easier to take, but as a casual user, who only needs to compare fonts occasionally, this is overkill.

The developers have done a great jobnwoth the UI. It’s gorgeous. However, I think it’s a niche product at best.
e January 21, 2009 at 11:44 am: to be honest, i am kinda meh on it. i personally like font managers to “manage” my fonts. the UI is beautiful but i want the vault in this case to hold all the fonts strewn across my system. maybe i am missing something but it left all my fonts everywhere and only refers to them in their current locations. i agree with rob, it’s too much $ too. i’ll stick with linotype thanks.
mcflash January 21, 2009 at 7:06 pm: The app looks stunning! I’m not sure if I can account for paying $45 for a font manager, but I wish I was a font-o-freak so I could!
Laurent Baumann January 21, 2009 at 11:53 pm lbaumann.com: @e the vault actually copy all your fonts, exactly like iPhoto does for your photos
Thanks for the review!
Milind Alvares January 21, 2009 at 11:55 pm goobimama.blogspot.com: The great Laurent Baumann himself! Thanks for dropping by. You have done an awesome job with the design I must say!

Note that this is not a review, but a press release. We’ll be doing a proper review of this app possibly sometime soon.
Brady J. Frey January 24, 2009 at 3:10 pm bradyjfrey.com: Seriously people, you’re complaining about $40+ for quality software? And font management to boot? Font management has always been a pain - Linotype’s free xplorer was a jump ahead of Extensis dated product, but didn’t allow us to collaborate in teams - although ironically their server version just came out about the same time now.

What’s funny is that while I’m still waiting for the FontXplorer Pro guys to get back to me about my quote for a server edition (we’re on 4 days, just an automated response), I demoed this between four users, and it stood up to some of our heavy web + print design with all my designers. Come monday I was going to have one of them buy the four copies.

…again though, fonts are a disaster to manage, I’d pay double for someone to get it right (even Apple can’t get it right). He did an excellent job finding an elegant solution to an age old problem. These are the reasons why Extensis is going the way of Quark - they shouldn’t have lost their innovation.
Milind Alvares January 24, 2009 at 5:36 pm goobimama.blogspot.com: @Brady: For most who aren’t involved with design, having a font manager is pointless. Especially when we do have Font Book for the Mac.
Brady J. Frey January 25, 2009 at 2:15 am bradyjfrey.com: Sure, I understand that - but if that’s the case, I’m sure those people wouldn’t even need to be talking about if $40+ is worth it for software they don’t need. But Font Book is trash, that program has been error prone since the entry OS X days, even Leopard’s build.
Bryan Hoffman February 16, 2009 at 8:46 pm spigotdesign.com: @Brady - Agreed that Font Book is terrible, I’d say even for non designers.

I’ve taken FontCase for a spin, and while there’s a lot to like about it, I’m sticking with Font Explorer X. Why?

1. Auto-activation.
2. Auto-activation.

FEX also got me out of the dark days of Extensis Suitcase, and I feel a strong loyalty because of it.
Brady J. Frey February 16, 2009 at 10:50 pm bradyjfrey.com: I should have updated my notes - I actually held back on buying this after we started testing further throughout the week. Auto-activation was a big factor, but we were having some import font bugs that were crashing the application frequently. Try as we might, we couldn’t get around it.

So for now, I’m still with Font Explorer… and I’m still waiting for them to email me back about the server edition. Hopefully someday they let me know:)
MacStories June 26, 2009 at 10:54 pm macstories.net: hey guys, check this out:
Get a Delicious Font Library with Fontcase. Review..and Giveaway next week!