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.

Better than Iweb?

I've got a shiny new mac, and it comes with all this free softare. Having gotten over my initial aggravation with iPhoto (will retroactively post that stuff sometime), and gotten over my snobbery at the limitations of free software, I'm sort of leaning into it.

Iweb doesn't create real HTML. It isn't a real HTML editor. Coming from Dreamweaver and Frontpage, I was very snotty and horrified at the thought of using it. However, one day I needed to post some pics of a church event where everyone could get to them. And I wanted to do it fast. And here's the beauty of Apple: it's not always poweful, it's not always technically correct, but it's FAST, and fairly elegant to be slopped together. So with barely any effort, voila, I had a slideshow of photos and a website up.

Thus my initial complain about switching to mac: macs are for idiots. But guess what? I like the option of being an idiot if I want to. Now that I'm trying to be productive, rather than prove my mental prowess at untangling knots of computer logic, maybe being an idiot is a great luxury. It costs thought - macs are pretty damn expensive. That's why I never really switched before. Macs are definitely in the domain of the wealthy, but after my tour, I entered those ranks. So I pay for the ability to slop together a generic, yet elegant website in 20 minutes or less.

Now moving on. Iweb has converted me to the concept of simpler is better. If I can build something that's GOOD ENOUGH, maybe I shouldn't always be so quick to crack open Dreamweaver or Photoshop.

So I've played with iweb, and it's sort of created a monster in me. The mac side of me wants easy and pretty, but the PC side of me wants MORE. I'm bored of the templates, and modifying them officially to create more templates is SO much work and so esoteric that it'd be better to design from scratch in Photoshop, chop it up and code it in Dreamweaver. Also, there is a freeware/shareware alternative for Dreamweaver on the mac platform called Nvu which is pretty darn sexy (score 1 for mac).

I've looked into iweb templates from third party vendors, and I'll talk about that later, but iweb 2.0 broke a lot of vendor's templates, so that turned me off some.

So now I have the iweb mindset, with a pc hunger for customization. So I wonder outloud, is there anything like iweb, just better? PS - most mac users are SO complacent that the search for the phrase "better than iWeb" (for things posted w/in the last 6 months) only comes up with 7 hits on google!

Here's what I've come up with so far for WYSWYG editors most like iweb for mac:

Rapidweaver
Sandvox
Goldfish
Freeway
and
Shutterbug

Also just found out about
Galerie and
Joomla.

No reviews just yet. I'll revisit this and also revise some of this post before I go on to in depth reviews and screenshots etc. But this is what I've found to be out there. Y'all let me know if you find other stuff. So far, the order I listed them in appears to be the order I prefer. Although Sandvox appears to be stronger, it has less theme offerings than Rapidweaver. Shutterbug actually might be my fave, but it's more specific in it's purpose. I'll let you know.

In terms of more traditional approaches to web design, there are some more apps to consider:
SeaMonkey Composer - Mozilla
Style Master - Mozilla (CSS prog)
NVU - already mentioned
Good page and
Kompozer - apparently an offshoot/update of NVU