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.

The Skeptical Switcher's Take on alternate color picker apps for mac:

When I switched to mac, I found disturbing the general disruption to my workflow with the lack of font management and previewing, previously available in Windows (freeware and Shareware programs available, not OS-native). I'll address my solutions to font management in a later article. For a platform so touted as a DESIGN friendly platform, I've been floored by the lack of functionality in Tiger in regards to previewing pictures and fonts, and then underwhelmed by Leopard's prettiness and improved preview capabilities, but at the expense of functionality and stability.

However, seek and ye shall find, and in that spirit, I've found some great, great finds for color scheme management on the mac platform. And so far, most problems I've had on the mac are easily enough solved if I'm willing to spend a little cash.

So I'd been a bit bummed out about losing two of my favorite color scheme programs: Tiger Colorimpact (my tool of choice) and Colorschemer, my second choice. Color Schemer is available for mac, but doesn't export the palettes to a format that the native mac colorpicker can use, so in programs using the standard mac colorpicker, it takes many extra steps to used these predetermined schemes. Okay, maybe not so many extra steps, but a LOT of extra clicks. And for someone who uses their hands and arms for a living, every keystroke counts!

Additionally, I was confounded by how basic the mac color picker was. It's been so long since I've actually had to deal with that horrible Windows native color picker, that I forgot how deficient the native tools given to us by Apple and Microsoft are.

So in my quest, I found some really, hidden gems that not many people seem to know about. I am the queen of "pimping my mac," so I found these two things that caught my eye:

Shades and
Painter's Picker.

Of the two, Painter's Picker is more heavy duty. It's a color scheme program in it's full glory: complementary, split-complementary schemes on the fly.



Shades is a little more monotone (get the pun?) in it's usage. It just gives you varied shades on the selected color. You can make a few alterations, but it's nowhere as full-featured as Painter's Picker, although the GUI look is much prettier.


The beauty of both of these alternate color pickers is that they show up in all cocoa apps like ilife, iwork, Photoshop (after you toggle a setting to use the apple picker and not photoshop's native picker). Any app that displays the standard mac colorpicker, will place icons for these third party pickers after the standard mac colorpicker choices. Cool, right?

Look at where on the colorwheel bar and how they show up in your average mac application:

After the 5 icons for the standard colorpickers, I have icons for the following color pickers: (left to right)
Tangerine, Shades, Colorate's Hex Converter/Picker, and Painter's Picker.

And for prices that don't break your wallet, even though they are starting to add up (see a future article of mine called, "The Real Cost of owning a Mac") I'm still fairly satisfied. I might even buy them both.

Some other solutions that I'm not in love with or haven't really tried so much thus far (will update) are:

Tangerine (Priciest $39.95) and seems highly powerful, yet unwieldy so far...Seems to be great for STORING schemes, but offers no help creating schemes other than just picking with the magnifying glass or entering the color values numerically. That to me isn't very great for workflow. I'd rather just create a colorschemer scheme, export it as a gif, put the picture on my desktop or in my document temporarily and use the mac dropper to pick the colors out manually. There doesn't appear to be a way to export the color schemes either, so there's got to be some finite number of schemes held. That's not really strong enough for me for $40. I think software developers might appreciate this more than web or graphic designers.

and
Mondrianum (Leopard only and looks cute - but I just switched back to Tiger) - so I don't think I'll get a chance to try that one out just yet. From what I've seen thus far, it's not a creation tool, more a showcasing of color schemes shared on the Adobe Kuler site which is a part of the Adobe Air development/delivery platform. Don't really get it yet, but I know this app isn't what I need the most.


If you're reading this post and there aren't screenshots, please check back within a day. In an effort to lessen excuses and procrastination, I make myself write the article first and publish it, and THEN come back and jazz it up. Seems to work so far.