Extensis has updated Suitcase Fusion 6 to add full compatibility with Mac OS X El Capitan (OS X 10.11) and Adobe Creative Cloud 2015.

The update is free for all Suitcase Fusion 6 users. The update download link can be found on the El Capitan compatibility announcement page.

Extensis has released Suitcase Fusion 6 today, bringing compatibility for the font management tool with the latest versions of Adobe Creative Cloud, Quark XPress, and Apple’s Yosemite OS. I hope to be publishing a full review later this week or early next.

The offer ends December 13, 2013, so act quickly.

Alien Skin has announced the upcoming release of Snap Art version 4. Snap Art is their natural media application for photographers and artists. It works with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, and is also a stand-alone application. Snap Art 4 will cost $99, with upgrades for $69.

Upgrade pricing up to 50% off the full product price for Suitcase Fusion 5 is available for Suitcase Fusion 3 users.

Reasons to upgrade to Suitcase Fusion 5:

If you’ve been holding on to Suitcase Fusion 3, now is the time to upgrade.

When I reviewed Suitcase Fusion 4 in May of last year there was plenty of new features that made for a sexy upgrade. With Suitcase Fusion 5, Extensis has chosen to focus on improving existing tools and stability, rather than adding to an already stellar feature set.

Existing users will find Fusion 5 quite comfortable. New users should read my previous review for a complete breakdown of all the features and know that Fusion 5 is a solid upgrade.

The biggest selling point of Fusion 5 is full compatibility with Adobe Creative Cloud as well as Creative Suite 6. This is a big selling point, more for Adobe than Extensis, if you ask me. Life is generally ok with an older version of Creative Suite, but if your Font Management app isn’t compatible with your design app of choice, life is miserable.

The new font panels offered by Fusion 5 allow Creative Cloud and Creative Suite users to preview and activate fonts right from within your favorite app, no need to switch between Fusion and InDesign just to activate new fonts. And if you’re like me and use a desktop and laptop, Fusion 5 will allow you to run it on multiple Macs, just like Adobe CC.

For web designers, integration with WebINK and its 6,500+ fonts is just a click away. Using fonts in your web designs couldn’t be much easier, because you can preview your existing web page with any font right from within Fusion 5.

The new QuickComp feature allows you to preview font combinations right inside Fusion 5 using pre-made templates, avoiding the hassle of switching between different documents and applications.

QuickMatch, for me, is still the killer feature. It allows you to select a font, and quickly view similar fonts in your collection, or in the WebINK or Google Web Fonts collection.

Fusion 5 allows you to check for font corruption and clear font caches, so there’s no need for other utilities, which I find to be a nifty bonus. I have enough apps installed on my Mac, and don’t need more for such a simple task.

I’ve been using Suitcase Fusion 5 with Creative Suite 6 for about a month now and found it to be superb. I can’t say I was surprised, as Suitcase has always been excellent. For designers with even a moderately-sized font collection, Suitcase Fusion 5 will increase productivity and allow for more creative font exploration.

I do have one complaint about Fusion 5. While the interface mostly looks the same, Extensis chose to update the graphical buttons. As a designer, it bugs the heck out of me. As you can see in the screenshot above, Fusion 4 on the left had a softer 3D look to the buttons. On the right, Fusion 5 keeps the same basic design, but the colors and shadows are really harsh and the edges more chiseled. Worse yet, the remaining buttons don’t share the same design. They’re flat. The whole interface looks like it was designed by multiple artists. Fusion 5 looks very “utilitarian”, and could definitely use a visual makeover.

That being said, Suitcase Fusion is designed for you to spend as little time in it as possible so you can focus on design. So the interface inconsistencies are fairly minor complaints. I do like the new space helmet icon, though!

I sound like a broken record every time I review Suitcase Fusion, so I won’t stop now. I highly recommend Fusion 5 to compliment your design toolbox.

Suitcase Fusion 5 is available for $99.95 for the full version; and from $49.95 for upgrades from previous versions—and runs on Mac OS X 10.6.8 and up. A 30-day trial version is also available for download.

For years (long before the OS X days) my font manager of choice has always been Extensis Suitcase. It’s always been reliable and worked as smoothly as can be expected. But when Fusion 3 was released, I began noticing problems. Nothing major, but it took forever to load, and the Fusion Core System Preference began to forget to launch quite often. It could have been my system and not Fusion, but I never found out. Overall it just wasn’t a smooth experience, so I switched to Font Explorer X and all was well… for a while. When Apple released Lion, however, Font Explorer began exhibiting all sorts of issues for me. As luck would have it, Extensis just released Suitcase Fusion 4. Within hours, it became my preferred font manager. Again.

At first glance, Suitcase Fusion 4 doesn’t appear to have changed much beyond the new icon (part of their new corporate re-branding). But use it for an hour or so and you begin to see they’ve changed much more than just its icon.

For starters, the problems I was having with slow load times of Suitcase, as well as Adobe InDesign with the auto-activation plugin installed, have gone away completely. Suitcase and InDesign both launch quickly and continued to run smoothly over the last two weeks. And because the Fusion Core is part of the app itself, there’s no System Preference amnesia to deal with anymore.

The Suitcase Fusion 4 interface will look familiar to existing users

Integration

The first thing I noticed was that Extensis’ WebINK technology is fully baked-in to Fusion. Your purchased WebINK fonts show up right in Fusion’s font source list, as well as approximately 4,600 other available fonts for purchase and use on your websites. I actually use WebINK for the fonts you see here on The Graphic Mac – so it’s nice to have access to them right in Suitcase. But Extensis didn’t stop there.

You also have Google’s Web Fonts available at your disposal for use in any application. Google Web Fonts show up in the source list as a separate library as well, so there’s no confusion as to where a font came from.

Fusion feature goodness!

All the past and expected features such as auto-activation in Adobe CS apps, font smart sets, and identification/keyword tools are available in Suitcase Fusion. The ability to leave fonts in place or add them to the Fusion Vault is still there (I prefer to use the Vault to prevent corruption and make backups easier), but a few more goodies are really what makes Fusion 4 a great upgrade.

Fusion 4 introduces an independent font panel into Adobe Creative Suite apps that not only allows you to preview fonts, but create customized font digests for specific projects. The panel requires CS 5 or higher to work.

On the maintenance front, you can now check for font corruption and clear font caches right from within Fusion – avoiding the need for other 3rd party utilities. But the new feature that really made my day was QuickMatch.

Selecting an available font from your installed fonts list and clicking on the new Quick Match icon displays a list of other fonts in your library that closely resemble the selected font.

OH HELL YEAH!!!

QuickMatch offers a slider to adjust the relevance of the matched results. You can also tick a checkbox to limit the results by font style or classification, making the task of finding just the right font quite simple.

To me, Quick Match is the killer feature that every designer will absolutely love!

And how’s this for cool… you can load an existing website (right from the web) and apply any font in your collection to the site to see what it will look like. Awesome! This is particularly useful if you plan on using the WebINK or Google Web Fonts technology I mentioned above.

Suitcase Fusion 4 is available for Mac OS X 10.5.8 and higher on an Intel Mac, and works with Adobe Creative Suite 3 and higher (I’m sure a CS6 plugin update will arrive shortly after Adobe releases CS6 to the public). The full version costs just $99.95, and upgrades from Fusion 2 or 3 cost just $49.95. A demo is available to see if Suitcase Fusion 4 is right for your preferred workflow.

With this latest updated, Extensis has cemented its dominant lead in the font management market, in my opinion. And it has certainly earned its place back in the Dock of my Mac Pro and MacBook Air.

If you’re in the market for a new font manager, or feel the need to use one for the first time, I HIGHLY recommend giving Suitcase Fusion 4 a try.

Until December 30th, 2011, each purchase or upgrade of the Suitcase Fusion 3 font manager for Mac, designers get the font identification tool FontGenius ($40 value) for FREE.

Grab your copy of Suitcase Fusion and get Font Genius free!

FontGenius allows designers to:

Visit the bundle page for more info.

This release updates Suitcase Fusion 3 for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

The new plug-ins automatically activate the exact fonts required for each file using the patented Font Sense™ technology to create a unique fingerprint for each font. Adobe Creative Suite auto-activation plug-ins now include:

• Adobe InDesign® CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5
• Adobe Illustrator® CS3, CS4, CS5, CS5.1 (shipping with CS5.5)
• Adobe Photoshop® CS4, CS5, CS5.1 (shipping with CS5.5)

Existing Suitcase Fusion 3 users may obtain the new plug-ins through the Check for Updates features of Suitcase Fusion 3.

What started with admiring the very slick icon, ended up being complete surprise to me, and a shift in my thinking about my preferred font management app of choice.

FontExplorer X Pro 3 (I’ll call it FEX from this point forward) isn’t the “mostly glitz and little guts” type of alternative application you run into when trying to replace a big-name app. FEX is stable, fast, intuitive, and actually works as advertised. After about an hour of use, I began to think “this is nice, but at some point today this thing is going to do something to tick me off.” FEX never did.

FontExplorer X Pro's main window contains exactly what you would expect in a font manager

The main window of FEX is much like any other font manager, listing your fonts and font sets in a column on the left, with a preview of fonts on the right. And like other font managers, FEX allows you to create groups of fonts you use frequently, add tags to your fonts for easy searching, get more in-depth info about your fonts, and set up custom type previews of selected fonts. Being a Suitcase Fusion user, I felt right at home in FEX.

Most importantly (to me anyway), FEX’s Auto-Activation in Adobe Creative Suite applications works perfectly!

Auto-activation works perfectly in my testing of Adobe CS4 and CS5 apps, as well as Quark XPress; an important aspect of a font manager for those with massive font collections and lots of incoming files from outside sources.

While other font managers offer a similar feature, I love FEX’s way of displaying information about a selected font. The Font Info window not only displays a visual graph of all the characters available in the font, but also gives you a quick look at the HTML code and the keyboard shortcut for specific characters such as the Register symbol.

FontExplorer X Pro's Font Info window offers vitals for your selected font

The list of features available in FEX is pretty thorough compared to any font manager on the market, including the ability to import Font Agent Pro and Suitcase Fusion font sets – making it easy to start using FEX immediately. Displaying your font samples seemed much more intuitive than Suitcase Fusion, and the ability to export fonts from FEX (you can choose to store your fonts wherever you want, or let FEX organize them for you) takes the process a step further than other font managers I’ve tried.

You can simply copy the fonts to a new folder, have them placed in a single .zip file, or create a disc image with them. And if you’re exporting a lot of carefully organized fonts, you can export the entire font structure of your sets. It’s very slick! Of course you can also choose the image format of exported font previews as well.

FontExplorer X Pro's preferences offer plenty of customization

For various reasons, I had been restarting my Mac or logging in & out a lot while testing FEX (nothing to do with FEX). After about a week of doing so, I noticed something that absolutely made my day.

While using Suitcase Fusion, starting up my Mac always came with a thrashing of my hard drive, and a severe delay in other startup items becoming available. This is due to Suitcase Fusion having to load all my fonts from its internal database. In fact, sometimes Fusion’s Core pref pane wouldn’t run at all, forcing me to manually turn it on in the System Prefs, which also meant having to re-launch InDesign if it was already open.

With disabling Fusion and running only FEX, the hard drive thrashing and slow startup times disappeared completely. I also noticed a much improved launch time with InDesign and Illustrator when using FEX compared to Fusion.

Fusion is a great font manager, but I’ve been happily using FEX for several weeks now, and I’m not sure I’ll stop using it at this point. It’s been great!

FontExplorer X Pro 3 is just $79 ($21 less than Suitcase Fusion!). A downloadable demo is available.