Preview installed fonts inside of programs...

In general, I've found that PCs handle fonts better than macs, mostly due to the fact that most apps that I use on the PC have instant font previews, where the font name is listed in the actual font typestyle, within the program itself so that you immediately know what you're getting. Additionally, there are several shareware programs that let you preview, move and categorize fonts that aren't installed (not seeing a lot of that in mac programs yet). Maybe I should mention them by name since mac users can run windows programs with Parallels or VMWare Fusion or Bootcamp.

My faves for PC are OT1Font Manager, Font Xplorer. I have my fonts stored in an extensive folder directory structure, with about 20 to 30 categories of fonts, such as whimsical, dingbat, all caps titling, formal cursive, handwriting non-cursive, etc. I found it easier this way, when I was designing websites and logos for clients, to easily narrow in on a font type and generate speciments in less than an hour, without the client ever having to know the difference between slab-serif , monospaced, unicase or anything.

Fast forward to current life on the mac. I've mostly gotten over not being able to peruse my uninstalled fonts. I believe I might have found a program that showed font previews of uninstalled fonts, but it didn't generate type specimen sheets, didn't allow for any moving of the fonts between folders and subfolders, and was all around inferior to the couple of PC progam I already paid for and own. Linotype Explorer is a freeware program that does fairly well, but I ended up opting out of that after finding this app that I'm about to mention.

So I skipped that portion of the problem and insteaded focused on the easiest to solve: being able to instantly see a font specimen of an installed font. Enter Stone's Fontsight. This program adds a top level menu in most cocoa apps, such as pages, textedit, etc., that allows you to see the fonts installed, listed in their own fontstyle. Like such:




So, although Linotype Explorer allowed me to make font groups and uninstall and install them with 1 click as a group, it didn't work with Fontsight, which uses OSX-native Font Book groups. So if I made a group in FontBook, I can preview the group in the menu, which is VERY helpful when discriminating between several similar fonts. It's worth mentioning that Linotype FontExplorer is a kick-butt app in general. It does for free what Suitcase did for $100+ and a better job than that. There even might be a way I could get it to work with Fontsight, but the reason I switched to mac is that things are supposed to just work. So I stop myself from doing too much research and patching. If I spend all my time (I've spent enough) trying to research fixes to problems I've already found solutions to for my pc, I wasted my purchase money in buying this mac.

The Fontsight program costs a measly $19 with FREE LIFETIME UPDATES! This my friend, brings me to one thing I really like about the mac. A lot of apps are REALLY cheap. Whereas most PC apps, even shareware, starts at about $35, mac apps can go for as cheap as $12! (Not if they come from Apple: who on earth thought it was reasonable to jump from $0 for Iphoto to $299 for Aperture? Are we paying for the free Iphoto retroactively?)

So, if you like to know what your fonts look like ahead of time, I'd suggest you invest in a test run of Fontsight. The demo is very forgiving, so much so that I purchased it mostly to support such stand up work from a great developer. Some other apps on my 'to buy' list get waylaided if the demo is too short or too crippled. So check it out and tell me if you like it.

Hello mac world!

I keep waiting until the proper time to start my switching to mac blog, but I realize, the proper time is now while I'm learning! I wanted to predigest the food like a mama bird and spit it out once it's nice and masticated, but I might as well write while I'm still researching and struggling a bit.

I'm a singer, and went on tour for 6+ months with about 12 other musicians, 10 of which had macs, so I thought, maybe it's time to just consider getting a mac. Having had a past life as a graphic designer, I'd owned an old G3 before, strictly to use to check website rendering of my sites in mac browsers, but I wasn't particularly impressed with macs then. And I'd also worked at the Discovery channel using a mac, and although I was quite competent, still not that impressed.

So finally, practicality and peer pressure made me pick up a shiny, new Aluminum Intel imac. And although I still have gripes and am not a total switcher (didn't throw out my pcs or laptops), I've got to notice that I spend more and more time on this machine. And it didn't solve all my life's problems are was advertised by all my mac friends.

The deal is this: PCs are cool. Macs are cool. The existence of both, hopefully, will force each other to keep being cooler, in an effort to bash each other's heads in.

This blog is dedicated to all of the problems I've had as a power user of PCs, while switching to mac. As much as mac is the underdog and the trailblazer, I see so many things that could be better were it not for the stubbornness of not wanting to admit that sometimes PCs get it right. Bill Gates has no problem seeing something cool on the mac and imitating it. It's time mac does the same and takes the best of both worlds and propels it into new heights ala Apple.

So in breaking the tradition of mac users everywhere, I am actually going to COMPLAIN about mac! The heresy. But I'm going to do it, because if you never ask for more, you won't get more. And in the words of the Abraham-Hicks manifestation camp, I'm not complaining to complain, every time I blog about what baffles me in mac land, I am launching a little rocket of desire for what I DO want. And so it is and so it shall be. Join me on this ride into the cult known as Apple.