A quick video overview of Extensis Suitcase Fusion 7. You can read my review here.
Tagged: Fusion
Suitcase Fusion 7: It’s kind of a big deal
As a graphic designer, I have a small set of tools that I depend on and trust. Since fonts are the lifeblood of most designers, a great font manager is vital to our workflow. I’ve been using Suitcase for decades because I’ve found it to be the best all-around tool for the job. It’s compatible with all my design apps, it’s fast and stable, and it offers just the right amount of nice new features to keep me upgrading. I fear that my reviews of each new release are beginning to sound like a broken record. (more…)
Support Ending for Suitcase Fusion 3
As of September 15, 2013, support will be discontinued for Suitcase Fusion 3. To continue to receive support, you must upgrade to Suitcase Fusion 5, which I reviewed last week.
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.
Suitcase Fusion 5: Ready for takeoff!
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. (more…)
Extensis to host free font management webcast for creatives
Extensis, makers of Suitcase Fusion 4, is hosting a free instructional webcast about managing fonts in the creative workflow. In this webcast, Extensis font expert Jim Kidwell will show you practical management techniques and helpful tips that can tame your unruly font beast.
Jim Kidwell will be available for a live Q&A at the end of the webcast
Managing Fonts in Modern Digital Design Workflows
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern
To participate: www.extensis.com/sf4-design
Extensis Suitcase Fusion 4: New version brings useful features
Extensis has released Suitcase Fusion 4, and brought with it a few new features that designers will love. In doing so, Extensis has raised the bar for other font managers when it comes to integrating fonts in the print and web world.
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.
Suitcase Fusion 2 now compatible with Tiger
Extensis has released an update to Suitcase Fusion 2, their industry-leading font management application, bringing full Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) compatibility. Version 13.1 also includes a number of new features and fixed issues, including:
- New ability to search for fonts by the “Date Added” to Suitcase Fusion.
- Added ability to search by “Keyword” with the QuickFind tool.
- New “Library” column in the Fonts pane shows where your fonts are located.
- Updated font corruption warnings when adding fonts.
- Ability to disable warnings from Suitcase Fusion 2.
- Plug-in manager improvements, including the ability to install more than one copy of a plug-in for multiple versions of a host application.
- Automatic removal of obsolete plug-ins.
- Suitcase Fusion 2 users on Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger) now have access to plug-ins for Adobe CS4 and Quark 8.
This is a free update for all current Suitcase Fusion 2 users. It’s easy to upgrade your current installation if you have Suitcase Fusion 2 currently installed. To update, from the Suitcase Fusion 2 menu, choose Check for Updates and follow the instructions to download and apply the update.
Fixing Suitcase Fusion launch problem after an OSX 10.5.6 update
If you’re running Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 and recently updated to OSX 10.5.6, you may have run into the problem of Fusion not launching. The cause of the problem appears to be an issue with your Mac’s Bonjour name if the name is too long, or contains spaces or special characters. If you are experiencing the problem, here’s a quick way to fix it that requires little effort and no special hacks or software tools. (more…)
Font management with Suitcase Fusion 2
The name is familiar. Everything else is groundbreaking. Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 redefines professional font management with a sleek, modern interface, time-saving tools and unmatched stability. Dynamic searching and advanced auto-activation in Fusion 2 makes selecting and activating fonts a snap. I’ve written a full review of Suitcase Fusion 2, which you can read at Macworld’s Creative Notes blog, where I covered the user interface, auto-activation, and my real-world experience using the application. Over the last few months, I’ve been using Fusion 2 with great results. Gone are the days of slow launch times of not only Suitcase, but InDesign, Illustrator and Quark as well. This is partially because Fusion 2 no longer needs to be open in order for font auto-activation to work. I’ve had no issues with crashing, fonts embedded in .eps files, or any other issues that seemed to have plagued previous versions of Suitcase. The new tear-off preview menus are a nice touch, as is the simple interface – right down to the icon. Everything is just easier and faster with Fusion 2. If you’re looking to upgrade your font management application, take a look at my review of Extensis SuitcaseFusion 2.
Extensis releases Suitcase Fusion 2
Extensis has released the newest version of our single-user font manager for Mac OS X, Suitcase Fusion 2. This release contains a whole slew of new features that we’re sure that you’ll find helpful and fun to use. Fusion 2 is compatible with the recently released Adobe Creative Suite 4 and Quark XPress 8. 
The following are the most prominent new features in Suitcase Fusion 2.
Modern technology
- Built for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
- Based on the Universal Type Client code base.
- The Suitcase Fusion Core™ keeps fonts active even when the Suitcase Fusion 2 is not running.
Auto-activation
- Auto-activation plug-in installation is now a breeze with the Plug-in install options built into Suitcase Fusion 2.
- To ensure a trouble-free workflow, the auto-activation plug-ins contain new features, including the ability to create document sets as well as check document fonts.
- Selective global auto-activation allows you to select which applications to have Suitcase Fusion 2 automatically activate fonts.
- Updated auto-activation plug-ins now include an XTension for QuarkXPress 8 and plug-ins for Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS4.
Font organization
- Improved search options allow you to quickly locate fonts using very granular font information.
- Smart Sets dynamically filter and display fonts based on your own custom settings.
- Font libraries allow you to organize fonts the way that you want.
- A portable Font Vault allows you to quickly backup your entire font collection, easily switch to an entirely different database, and even move your Font Vault to another drive.
System font management
- Improved system font management features help you avoid font conflicts and other problems with system fonts.
- Easy identification helps you disable unnecessary fonts in your system folders.
Previewing fonts
- Enhanced font preview options, including automatic encoding detection for most Roman and non-Roman languages.
- Floating previews allow you to preview fonts as transparent document overlays.
- Easily customized previews allow you to quickly display preview text as you want it.
- Glyph View Window allows you to inspect the glyphs of a selected font and compare them to any other font in Suitcase Fusion 2.
Font corruption checking and repair
- Enhanced font corruption detection and repair.
For more info, check out the Extensis website.