I first reviewed SmoothCursor last November, and it immediately found a permanent home on my Mac because it allowed me to adjust the tracking speed of my mouse and Magic Trackpad independently. Unlike most 3rd-party drivers I had tried in the past, SmoothCursor actually worked perfectly for me.

Since then, Troikalabs has updated SmoothCursor to version 2.0.5.

The new version brings a few new features, such as the ability to alternate between two completely separate profiles using a user-definable hotkey. This is fantastic, because now you can not only set the tracking of your mouse and trackpad separately, but you can have two different profiles for doing so. So lets say you want slower more precise movements for Photoshop work, and faster movement for when you’re just surfing the web, and writing emails. You can just tap a key combo and your tracking speeds get updated automatically. You can also set a separate key combo for temporarily switching profiles while holding the keys down.

Another change that came about with the current version of SmoothCursor is that it is no longer free. The additional profile features and Mountain Lion Notification Center support have brought a $2.75 fee with it. A small price to pay for such useful features, in my opinion.

You can buy SmoothCursor directly from the Troikalabs website, and a demo is available.

If you manage a group of five or more Macs, OS X Server may be worth the time to invest in. Exploring the Server App in OS X Server is a lengthy look at Mac OS X Server.

In part one of The iMac 27″ for graphic designers, I covered the reasons for choosing the late 2012 iMac 27” to replace my 2006 Mac Pro. As a graphic designer who works in Adobe Creative Suite apps all day long, with file sizes pushing the 1GB range, power is important. But as I found out with my MacBook Air, the Mac Pro just isn’t necessary anymore. Not only does the iMac have all the power you need, but it’s a much more elegant hardware solution, and significantly easier on the pocketbook. I also listed some of the pros and cons of the iMac.

Now I’m going to talk a bit about my experience actually using the iMac for the last two months.

At first, the 27” iMac was a difficult transition as far as the screen size goes. I’ve been using a 30” LCD for quite a few years, so I not only lost the 160 pixels of height, but the physical dimensions of the 30” screen is larger. The 27” iMac just looks tiny sitting next to my old screen. The reality is that the iMac as plenty of screen real estate for all but the most app-crazy user—those who like to have Mail, Tweetbot, Safari and iTunes all open and visible at the same time.

Between the powerful processors, and the speedy SSD storage drives, the iMac offers more than enough juice to run the typical stable of design-related applications, such as: Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc. Along with those apps, I typically have Extensis Suitcase Fusion, Pixa, Apple Mail, Messages, Reminders, and Safari open. And finally, utilities such as Dropbox, aText, CopyLess, Evernote, Pocket, and Transmit are generally always open because they’re either background apps that live in the menubar, or small apps that take little resources to keep open. And of course, iTunes is almost always blasting music, or playing a podcast.

With all that running, the iMac still performs tasks at a speed that is not only acceptable, but impressive.

While Photoshop runs much speedier than it did on my 2006 Mac Pro, InDesign is the CS app that shows the most improvement. Scrolling documents with numerous images and vector art placed on each page is quite fluid now, showing no signs of the stuttering I experienced on the Mac Pro.

Saving enormous Photoshop files is fast, though it probably seems faster to me now that Photoshop can save files in the background while I switch to another app to continue working on something else.

Illustrator is also improved in virtually all areas, though I don’t use it often enough to say if it’s a great improvement.

Bridge (which I use much less often, now that I’ve found Pixa), runs really well. Folders with hundreds of high resolution images loads up quickly, and scrolling and zooming is fluid.

Unfortunately, Adobe still hasn’t implemented Full Screen support in the Creative Suite apps. When Apple introduced it I was skeptical, but now I love working in Full Screen mode. The iMac performs admirably while switching between Spaces—whether I’m swiping on the Magic Pad or hitting Control + Arrow keys to switch. Mission Control comes up instantly as well.

One app that always seemed to chug along at a snail’s pace on my Mac Pro is Apple’s iPhoto. I actually began splitting up my iPhoto libraries by year to speed up the thumbnail drawing process. With the iMac, I have several year’s worth of photos in a single library and it still opens and is ready to start viewing photos in a matter of seconds.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with the iMac as my main work Mac. While I still do a little work on the road using my MacBook Air, I’m finding myself making an effort to do it less often, so I can spend more time on the iMac.

If you’re due for a hardware upgrade, and you want a desktop Mac, I highly recommend the 27” iMac. The Mac Pro is a fantastic machine, and when Apple releases the new models later this year, they’re probably going to blow away the iMac in the speed and expansion departments. But the reality is that they’re still going to be more expensive than the iMac, and you’ll still have to bring your own LCD screen on top of that. Unless you’re doing high-end video/audio work and require massive amounts of internal storage, you simply can’t justify the price compared to the very capable iMac.

The first thing I had to come to grips with is the revelation that I don’t NEED all the expansion that the Mac Pro has to offer. In the distant past, the days when a 16GB stick of RAM took you a year or so to save-up for, the Mac tower models were the only way to go for pro designers. The desktop models simply weren’t made for people like us.

But times have changed. With NO exception, every Mac model available today can easily be used by the most demanding print and web designers—this includes the MacBook Air and the MacMini. If you think you NEED more, you’re most likely overestimating your needs. Today’s Macs are powerful enough for working with Gigabyte sized files with as little as 8GB of RAM.

Now I didn’t say that every Mac model is a perfect fit, far from it. And that’s where my decision got difficult.

Background

You see, in the six years I had my Mac Pro (the longest I have ever used a single Mac), the year I had a PowerMac G5, and the years prior to that when I had several G3 and G4 towers, I never upgraded anything beyond the RAM and one additional internal hard drive in the Mac Pro. For all the expansion capability I was paying for, I never used it. It wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it—prices came down quite a bit over the years. It’s because I simply didn’t need to.

Though my dual-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro had 11GB of RAM and plenty of storage, there were two problems that I simply couldn’t overcome. The Xeon processors were showing their age, and I could no longer upgrade the OS.

Because I had been using a MacBook Air (2011 model), I already knew that I could accomplish what I needed on a lower-end Mac if I had to. In fact, the SSD drive more than made up for the lack of RAM and processing power compared to my Mac Pro.

So it basically came down to how many wires I wanted hanging off the back of my desk.

The 27” iMac

I settled on the 27” iMac for two primary reasons. The first was the screen and built-in iSight camera. Though I have a perfectly good 30” LCD hooked up to my Mac Pro, it put out a lot of heat the way it sat in my hutch-style desk (see image below), and it used old connectors which made it impossible to use going forward without buying adapters (more cables). I hate heat, and I hate cables. Between the Mac Pro and the 30” LCD, I had a real sauna in my office—which wasn’t helped by the fact that I live in the desert where the 120 degree heat in the summer is constantly coming through the window.

The iMac’s 27” screen is, for lack of a better way to describe it, delicious. I do miss the extra pixels and screen size of my 30” LCD, but it can’t match the iMac for color vibrancy and convenience. Not to mention, I happily lose two cables for the monitor, a microphone cable and a camera cable. Bonus!

Plus, the iMac puts out virtually no heat to speak of. It’s amazing how Apple squeezed all that power and a large LCD screen into the space they did and not have any fan noise or heat. That’s right, I said no fan noise. With my Mac Pro, playing Diablo 3 would crank up the fans. Heck, just visiting sites that use Flash (primarily video sites) would sometimes make my office sound like a wind tunnel. With the iMac, there’s nothing but silence. This is important for me because with a hutch-style desk, the iMac sits back in a sort of cubby. With the 30” LCD I had, the heat would build-up in there and come out right in my face. It was quite noticeable and extremely uncomfortable.

The second reason was the cost vs. benefit ratio was too difficult to pass on. Not only was I getting a great LCD screen, but I was getting the latest hardware at a fraction of the price of a new Mac Pro.

I went with 16GB of RAM, which was easily added via the RAM ports on the back of the iMac. I also decided on the 1TB Fusion drive instead of the pure SSD which would have cost significantly more. Considering how long I kept my Mac Pro, I kind of wish I had just spent the money and went pure SSD.

The Fusion drive is so much speedier than a regular spinning hard drive that it’s difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t used a Mac equipped with SSD storage. Boot-up and shut down times are more than halved, and applications launch much faster. Opening and saving files is significantly faster as well.

That being said, the Fusion drive “feels” slower than the pure SSD in my nearly two-year-old MacBook Air. Still, it’s so much faster than the hard drive I had in my Mac Pro that the fractions of a second difference between the Fusion and pure SSD isn’t worth giving a second thought to, for the most part.

I had a large secondary hard drive I removed from my Mac Pro and put in an external case for using as a (manual) backup drive, which is connected via a USB cable. I don’t mind the fact that it’s external now, as it allows me to turn it off when it’s not in use (which is most of the time), or unplug it and store it elsewhere if I wish. I have an Apple Time Capsule for Time Machine backups as well.

I also purchased the external Apple SuperDrive, since Apple has removed them from the iMac all together. I have a lot of optical media, and many clients still want things on CD/DVD, so the cost was well worth it. The only drawback for me is that the USB cable that comes with the SuperDrive is extremely short, so you pretty much have to place it right underneath the iMac (you can see it in the lower right corner of the photo above, sitting on top of the external drive).

I still prefer an extended keyboard for the extra F-Keys and Num pad on the right, so I kept one wire there. But I went with the Magic Mouse and Magic Pad (both wireless), to replace my wired Kensington Turbo Mouse. It’s nice to be free of those cables!

Complaints

After two months of using the new iMac, I only have a few relatively minor complaints.

The first are the connection ports. They’re located on the back of the iMac. For USB, Thunderbolt and Ethernet ports, that’s fine. But for SD Card slot and audio-out ports, it’s a real pain. I don’t use SD cards very often, so it’s not that big a deal.

However, I get up early in the morning and work later at night, and like to listen to podcasts or music as I’m working while my wife and son are asleep. With my Mac Pro, I could just plug-in headphones to the front headphone jack. During the day, I could listen to music through the external speakers I have which were plugged-in to the Mac Pro’s audio-out port on the back of the tower.

With the iMac, there is only one audio-out port (headphone jack), and it’s located on the back with all the other ports. So unless I want to constantly turn the iMac around to plug and unplug speakers and headphones, I can only use one or the other.

I have a USB cable for my DSLR camera and a Lightning cable for my iPhone constantly plugged in and ready to use, which you can see at the bottom middle sitting on the base of the iMac. It’s not a big deal to leave them there, but it would have been nicer to have at least one USB port and the headphone jack on the front of the iMac for the sake of convenience. But there’s no way Apple is going to sacrifice the iMac’s stunning beauty for the sake of a minor inconvenience.

I also miss the adjustable stand of my Dell 30” LCD. It allowed for height, swivel, and tilt adjustments. The iMac, like the Thunderbolt Cinema Display, has a stand that allows only tilt adjustment.

iMac 27” Pros:

• Large LCD screen with excellent quality and no cables to deal with
• Lightweight enough to make it easy to turn around for port access
• RAM upgrade is simple
• Overall speed is superb
• No fan or hard drive noise whatsoever
• No heat issues
• Plenty of external expansion options

iMac 27” Cons:

• Fusion Drive is somewhat disappointing compared to pure SSD storage. Though it’s barely noticeable, it doesn’t “feel” as fast as a MacBook Air when waking from sleep, launching apps, etc.
• Port positions are awkward
• No adjustable base with swivel to make height adjustments or make it easy to rotate the iMac around for port access
• Only one audio-out port (headphone jack), so its either speakers or headphone, but not both

As far as cost goes, there is no comparison to the Mac Pro. The iMac gives the average user so much more for much less money. While you do lose the internal expansion and a few ports, it’s not enough for print and web designers to justify the cost of the Mac Pro. Perhaps if you did high-end video editing as well as print/web design, you could make a legit argument for the Pro.

In part two, I’ll tell you about my experience using the new 27” iMac in a real-world design work environment. If you have any questions about what I’ve said so far, feel free to leave a comment below.

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.

I recently got to use one for a day of design work, web surfing, and general computing, and got my answer. The Magic Mouse is compact, and glides smoothly on your desk. The cursor was very responsive, and not the least bit “jumpy” on any surface I tried it on, including my lap. But that’s pretty much where the love affair ended for me.

With the exception of Apple’s iMac hockey-puck mouse years ago, I can’t recall ever using a more uncomfortable mouse in my 20-plus years of computing.

The very thing that makes it so stunning to look at also makes it so uncomfortable to use. After about an hour of working in Photoshop and InDesign, my hand was cramped from squeezing it. It’s just too low-profile for long-term use. I felt like I had to work too hard to keep control of it. While the touch clicking and scrolling was easy enough, using the limited gestures available was virtually impossible for me. I simply couldn’t hold the mouse and swipe at the same time without contorting my hand to the point of causing more cramps in my fingers. The amount of time wasted trying to get the gestures to work could be accomplished the old-fashioned way. Of course, nobody says you MUST use the Magic Mouse for your daily computing needs. Due to its compact size and Bluetooth connection, the Magic Mouse makes a great compliment to your MacBook Pro when you’re on the road. It’s also fine for users who may not require a lot of mousing around, such as writers or anyone who makes extensive use of the keyboard vs. the mouse. At $69 though, the Magic Mouse is awfully expensive for a “backup” mouse.

Adobe Illustrator CS4 brings those two huge features and a whole lot of existing feature enhancements to Illustrator users who’ve been patiently waiting. Multiple Artboards: Think of multiple Artboards as essentially multi-page documents, much like a page layout program, except that it allows you to have different size artboards within your document. So what’s the big deal you ask? Read on… Let’s look at an example of why this is so great. Before Illustrator CS4, you probably had an Illustrator version of client X’s logo in full color, another file for the logo in Pantone colors, another version for solid black, yet another version solid white (for placing on dark backgrounds), and finally, another version in grayscale (for placing in B&W ads, etc.). That’s a minimum of five .ai or .eps files for a single logo. The most minor of changes to the logo would require you to edit five files, and then update five different files in every InDesign document they were used in. With Illustrator CS4, you have a single logo file containing all five versions of the logo. And when you place the logo file into InDesign, you choose which artboard (via InDesign’s Place options) you wish to have in your document. If you choose the artboard with the black only version of the logo, the Pantone colors used in the logo on another artboard are not brought into your document, keeping your swatches panel free of the clutter of unused colors. Illustrator CS4 allows up to 100 artboards in each document, and you can even create an artboard inside another artboard, allowing you to easily export just a piece of a composition. Also included as part of the new artboard feature is the ability to set bleed amounts to your Illustrator documents, much like you can in InDesign documents. While not a huge feature, it’s nice to be able to work in Illustrator with a completely accurate artboard and not have to “fake” a bleed area. When exporting your artwork from Illustrator, you have the option of saving each artboard as a single mutli-page PDF file, or as single page files in a numbered sequence. Gradient Transparency: The second big feature request from Illustrator users for years has been the ability to use transparency in gradients. Previously, you had to use a complicated method of setting up masks to simulate transparency. Even then, it rarely yielded the results you wanted. With Illustrator CS4, you can set the colors of your gradient, the use the gradient slider to use adjust one or both color stops to a custom level of opacity to show objects beneath the gradient. Along with the ability to use transparency in gradients, Adobe has added the ability to adjust your gradients right on the object, rather than being forced to make a trip to the gradient panel every time you want to adjust your gradient. With the gradient controls right on your object, you get immediate visual feedback, allowing you to focus on your design without interruption. Radial gradients have also seen an upgrade, with the new ability to set dimensions independently. You can now create radial gradients of any proportion or shape. User Interface: Adobe Illustrator CS4 shares the new GUI with it’s Creative Suite counterparts. Tabbed documents are spring-loaded, making it easy to transfer objects between documents. Simply by dragging your object over another document tab, that document pops open so you can drop your objects right where you want it placed. The application frame keeps your document and all the panels in a single, resizable window, and features spring-loaded panels which allow you to expand the panel of your choice simply by dragging an object on top of the panel icon. Feature Enhancements: Another feature shared between Creative Suite applications are Smart Guides. Objects can be aligned to the artboard rather than the cursor. The guides are more intuitive in CS4 with on-object readouts, allowing you to stay focused on your work, rather than on the alignment panel. Isolation mode has also seen advancements. I can’t say enough how useful Isolation mode is. By double-clicking a group of objects, you can visually isolate those objects on the artboard, having all other objects grayed out. Once in Isolation mode, you can adjust objects such as clipping masks, images, gradient mesh objects and compound paths. It’s also much easier to adjust the stacking order of objects in Isolation mode, greatly reducing the need to use Paste In Front/Back and Arrange commands. Once you’re finished editing, simply hit the Escape key to exit Isolation mode. The Appearance panel has added the ability to turn on and off individual effects, much like you can show/hide layer effects in Photoshop. But it doesn’t stop there. You can also apply and edit individual effects right in the Appearance panel. In the past, if you tried to apply a Graphic Style to an object that already had another Graphic Style applied to it, the new style would replace the original. With CS4, the new style is applied on top of the original, meaning you can apply multiple styles to the same object. So if you have a style to add a custom stroke, you can apply that, then apply a second style that would include a drop shadow or gradient. Very handy! Text on Path has been greatly improved, which is to say that it’s actually usable now. Adobe has adjusted kerning methods in the type engine so that type on a path truly looks great right out of the box. Performance: Illustrator CS4 doesn’t really perform much faster than CS3 overall, but specific features do, making the whole application feel faster in the end. The usability enhancements to gradients, guides and various other tools all contribute to a much more productive Illustrator experience. Should you upgrade?: This depends on just how much you use Illustrator. Designers who use Illustrator primarily for occasional logo creation and nothing more may find that the feature additions just aren’t enough. However, if you spend any amount of time every day in Illustrator, you’re probably going to be quite pleased with Illustrator CS4. As for me, the unified interface with the rest of the Creative Suite applications, multi-artboard support, tabbed windows, and feature enhancements more than justify the cost. Pricing: Adobe Illustrator will ship in October with the rest of the Creative Suite applications, and will be available for $599. Owners of Illustrator CS, CS2 or CS3 can upgrade to CS4 for $199. Owners of Freehand 9, 10 or MX, and CorelDRAW users can switch to Illustrator CS4 for $199 as well. See Adobe’s Web site for more Illustrator purchase information.

First, the good:

Upon launching Fontcase, you’ll see great care has been taken to make sure it’s a good Mac OS X citizen — lots of polish to the interface, and also uses many 10.5 features such as Quick Look. The interface is very iTunes-like, which I think is a smart approach — stick with what users know. The sidebar has nice icon design and there are clear distinctions visually between each section. Importing my fonts went smoothly and was even smart enough to not import duplicate font files from the Finder. The 1200+ fonts took less than 5 minutes to fully import. Once your fonts are added, there are two main views, an “icon” or Grid and List view. Grid view is almost like the grid of iPhone apps on the iPhone screen, with mini-previews of each font in it’s font name. It’s a nice looking feature, but a bit unwieldly to browse through a large collection List view has the typical columns (which are customizable) and lets you sort by name, foundry, kind, etc. The text preview column doesn’t seem to allow for font previews in the font name, which I found to be a limitation. In Grid view, active fonts have a green stripe along the bottom of the block, System Fonts a yellow & black industrial “warning” stripe, and deactivated fonts are gray. In List view, the check box is your visual indication. I kinda would like to see the color indications carried over to List view, but perhaps it makes things a bit too busy visually. Both Grid View & List View have nice preview options at the bottom, with tabs for Characters, Waterfall and Body text. A very nice way to really get an overview of how the font will look in multiple settings. The Characters tab also has a very handy feature where a double-click on the character will show a popup glyph viewer which lets you view all the unicode glyphs for every font in your library. Very nice touch. With this popup, you can view the ascender, cap height and even the unicode code and HTML entity right from within Fontcase. The Compare feature also uses these tabs, so you can view a side-by-side comparison of Characters, Header Text and Body text. There are options for the type of greeking text that is used, and you can also copy it to the clipboard to place into your layout. Again, nice touch. Each font has a slide-down info window that can be populated with extensive details about the font, and used later for sort via Smart Folders. Tags are present in Fontcase, and provide a nice way to use the Smart Folders to sort fonts in different groups based on personal choices. Smart folders work just the way you’d expect, and they have extensive options for customizing your Smart Folder searches (with some limitations — see gripes section below). Another handy tool is the print feature, allowing you to print out sample pages which include the fonts metadata. The pages are auto-formatted and look sharp. One feature I did not test, as I am a one man show, is the font sharing feature. The developers claim this will eliminate the need for large companies to have a centralized font server. If true, it could be big. I have to wonder about the legality of one of the ways in which Fontcase shares fonts, which appears to physically move fonts from one computer to the other – but I have to assume they’ve done their homework on that. Fontcase has an option to import Font Explorer X metadata, which is fantastic. It keeps all your custom info intact. I didn’t test this extensively, but it seemed to work fine for me (and see limitations below).

And now, some of the big gripes:

Smart Folders do not auto-update (you need to click away then back for them to update). I don’t know how this made it past the other beta testers, but this needs to be fixed pronto. For me the beta period was so short I didn’t even get a chance to send feedback before 1.0 was released. There are no number counts next to sets, collections, etc. There is a running total displayed at the bottom of the app window (a la iTunes) but for me it’s confusing to have to look all around the window to see counts. I’d rather have it like Apple Mail where the count is next to the folder itself. Generating previews as you scroll through the app slows things down. To be fair, Font Explorer X is no speed demon in this aspect either. While I was scrolling through my fonts in either List view or Icon view, I continually ran into delays and in the Icon previews a “generating preview” message as I scrolled quickly. Not a deal breaker, but something to be aware of. Fontcase seems to be no better or worse than FEX in this regards. Can’t seem to find a way to use the font name as the preview text. This limitation rears up in List view, where the font name text can just blend in with the interface. I can only assume this option is easy to add and will be coming soon. FontExplorer X sets import, but the fonts weren’t placed into them. Kind of a bummer. When I saw the import options for font Explorer X, I was stoked. Actually using them was a letdown. One needs to manually drag all their fonts to their respective sets/folders/collections. One possible workaround would be to drag or export your fonts from your existing font manager to the Desktop, then drag & drop from the Finder onto the newly created folders in Fontcase. Of course I didn’t realize this until well after I had already done the batch import in one fell swoop.

UPDATE: Fontcase was updated to version 1.0.3 after this article was written, addressing FEX import bugs.

On the plus side, Fontcase did generate Smart Folders based on the FEX Smart Folders. Because Fontcase doesn’t have the extensive Smart Folder criteria that FEX has, some manual editing may be necessary. Smart Folder criteria is lacking. While there is a good number of options for Smart Folders, I found the ones I used most in FEX were not there:, Date Imported and Date Last Activated. For a font manager to have Smart Folders, but not allow you to quickly sort the fonts you recently added or recently used today, this week or this month is a huge oversight in my opinion. I dropped a line to the developers on this and was told it would be implemented “in a future release” with no indication of time. Until these are included, I just cannot use Fontcase as a replacement for FEX. There is no “Date Imported” metadata automatically added to the fonts. Really? This is a font manager. We need to know when we added fonts, trust me. Along with “Last Activated”, this seems a serious omission or oversight. No auto-activation. For some, this may not be an issue. I however have come to rely on this heavily in FEX and see it’s omission in Fontcase to be something that will put off some potential adopters. This too I was told was planned for a future release. Whether these future releases are 1.1 or 2.0 releases, and what sort of general timeframe we’re looking at was not disclosed.

And a few small gripes:

There seem to still be some small details that need attention, not unusual for a 1.0 release. When in List View, there is no horizontal scroll bar if your columns do not fit in the window, and the columns have limits to their resizing. Fontcase attempts to fit everything in the window, but if you have many columns activated, this looks terrible. Quick Look seems redundant with all the graphical previews in the main interface. Perhaps handy for the Icon/Grid view though.

Final thoughts:

Overall Fontcase is pretty solid for a 1.0 release, and in general I think Bohemian Coding did a great job. It’s definitely a step up from the OS X Font Book (and maybe the target buyer) but it still seems to have small oversights throughout the functionality. For my money, it’s always those small details which make or break an app — not the showy “front page” features, but the little things that show the developers have thought through things thoroughly. While in general I think Fontcase has indeed been thought through, as I mentioned in the gripes section above there are just a handful of small things that for me will get in the way of my workflow. In my opinion, none of the gripes I mentioned are major faults with the software, so I will definitely be keeping an eye on the progress of Fontcase. For such a strong 1.0 release, the inevitable 0.x releases should round out the rough edges and I can seriously envision myself considering Fontcase as my new font management app Fontcase is currently €35 (about $46 USD) until February 4, 2009, and €42 (about $55 USD) after the promo ends. A five pack, and a ten pack for business is also available. There is a 15-day demo available, to test out Fontcase to see if it’s right for you.

• Four pages on “avoiding registration mishaps by setting a perfect trap.” Now I must admit that knowing what trapping is and how it can affect your document when printed is important, but any commercial printer worth the ink on their business card handles the trapping for you. Additionally, 99% of the RIPs out there that a printer uses will override your trap settings when printed unless you specifically tell them not to – in which case your carefully trapped document can turn out to be a mess because their RIP is calibrated to trap to their particular output device. In the end, this was a great way to fill four pages, but of little use to anyone who knows commercial printing.

• Three pages of a tutorial on how to “Create realistic Polaroid-style frames for your images” without the use of Photoshop. Great, I love tutorials. Unfortunately, the end result of this tutorial looked like a design-school first-day project. It was horrible. The image was at a different angle than the white Polaroid-style frame it was sitting on. Completely amateur, completely useless. Plus, there are easier ways to create Polaroid-style frames for your images.

• Two pages of “10 surefire ways to cut your printing costs.” Now this was something of use for most designers – except that the tips were so vague in nature that they were barely useful. One full tip essentially is to “properly prepare your digital files.” Another was “plan ahead to avoid rush charges.” Well no duh!!! Another wasted 2 pages.

• One full page on how to “upgrade your workflow with Adobe Creative Suite 3.” This was nothing more than the product chart showing what programs are included with what Creative Suite – the very same chart you can find on Adobe’s Web site (and the 5,000 other sites that had the chart and description several months back and that you’ve already seen).

• One full page on how to “nest frames to create a one-of-a-kind object.” OK, so this was actually useful.

• One full page on “getting text and objects to peacefully coexist” – which was basically a very brief tutorial on how to anchor an object/image into a text frame. This tutorial was also useful to new InDesign users, but didn’t really go into enough detail to show you how useful it really can be.

• One and a half pages on how to see what color profile is embedded in your Photoshop image and how to safely scale images. Yawn…

• Three quarter page software review of Teacup Software’s ImageSwapper plugin – which allows you to replace your low-res images with their high-res equivelant just before print time. Um, who still does this? Well, large catalog-makers probably still do this, but there are automated workflows for OPI that link to image databases to handle the job. I can’t blame the newsletter for covering this, because it is a nice piece of software, but so limited in its audience that I hardly think it worth the back cover of the newsletter.

That’s it. $12.25 of my subscription for one issue, and not a single valuable piece of information as a pro-user, and about a page and a half of useful info for beginners. Perhaps I just received an older issue (it was Volume 4, Number 6 for whatever that’s worth) and the content has gotten better. Or maybe when you get the “free issue” you only get a portion of a full issue. Either way, I wasn’t impressed at all. This is definitely not something I consider worth the investment. Needless to say, I won’t be subscribing. Oh, by the way, I received another invoice a few days after receiving the free issue… I give them an “A” for persistence.