By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Apple on October 21, 2008 at 9:37 am
Suitcase Fusion 2 was released by Extensis today, available here from the Extensis webite.
This is the latest version of a piece of software which first hit the Mac when DTP was a pretty neat idea. Then, Apple’s venerable Font/DA Mover was the approved way of activating fonts. Suitcase
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Comment by jbug - October 21, 2008 on 3:25 pm
Font management is important and frankly FontExplorer and FontBook do not cut it in a real production shop.
I suspect that your comments mean A) you are not in a production environment and B) you have not even tested the software. You might try that before passing judgment– since the download is free from their site. I did the trial yesterday and so far very good. One person’s opinion.
On a side note- not very reasonable to publicly blame a small software company on the entire financial crisis.
-JBug
Comment by - October 21, 2008 on 10:16 pm
After reading your post earlier I felt obliged to reply:
When it comes to Extensis software I can confirm that there is a slight premium for customers here in Europe. The reason for this is essentially down to two factors:
1. Extensis software is developed in North America and so subsequently foreign language applications typically cost more to develop and to properly test.
2. A portion is to cover the costs in offering technical support - Not only do we offer technical support locally here in Europe but we also offer support natively in a number of European languages.
Our highly trained staff take great pride in being able to diagnose a wide variety of font relate production issues creative professionals encounter from orphan and corrupted fonts to explaining why apostrophe
Comment by - October 22, 2008 on 8:25 am
Just to set the record straight. We are a production shop with over 8000 typefaces to juggle. Opening a job may need any one of those fonts or new ones.
Currently our Macs are 50-50 Font Explorer and Suitcase Fusion. We used to be 100% Font Reserve and before that Classic Suitcase for many years (MasterJuggler before that).
As the blog says, there are many interesting new features in Suitcase Fusion 2, it is up to the reader to decide whether they are actually worth the upgrade. The deciding factor will probably whether you still run earlier versions of QuarkXPress and CS applications. We have to keep all versions available back to QXP6 (to save back even further) and inDesign 2 to stay compatible with clients. In which case it is better for us to stick with Suitcase Fusion 1.
Since QuarkXPress 8 arrived we have been running partially without a font manager to automatically open fonts.
This has not been as problematic as we first thought. Mac OS X lets Quark’s missing-fonts dialogue box to open and be on screen at the same time as Font Explorer and Suitcase Fusion 1 so it’s a simple process of selecting the right fonts and opening them. Font Book would do the same job.
As for pricing of the upgrade, I cannot imagine there is a great deal of difference between American English and the English spoken in the rest of the world. Most of us can put up with color, ‘ize’ and the other slight spelling differences. Whenever we have needed support for Suitcase
Comment by Jacques Daviault - October 22, 2008 on 1:56 pm
I’m a font-a-holic and quite honestly am perfectly happy with OSX’s native Fontbook. I know it can’t compare with the commercial releases for features, but none of those can compare with Fontbook for price. And these days, price is paramount.
I’m also a bit leery of applications that do what a system application already does, and the fear likely harkens back to the days of Pre-OSX extension hell, but suffice to say I prefer to not tempt fate.
Comment by Chris Stevens - October 22, 2008 on 10:34 pm
One thing to point out is that Suitcase Fusion 2 is OSX 10.5 Leopard only and so doesn’t make sense to have plug-in support for Quark 6 and CS2 since neither of those applications are supported by Quark and Adobe on OSX 10.5 Leopard. Indeed they’re known to have several issues on Leopard as you can see if you visit the Quark and Adobe forums.
Also as mentioned by Richard, the UK is in with the rest of Europe because the European office providing local support is in the UK, although the area we support also includes the Middle-East and Africa. Whilst you may submit a support query via our website and get a reply from the generic ’support@extensis.com’ email address, the replies for customers in Europe will have been handled during European office hours by one of the European employees. If the response was coming from the US only you wouldn’t ever get an answer during European office hours as Extensis in the US is on the west coast (8 hours behind).
We’re also available via telephone in UK, France and Germany, for those who want to talk to someone about the software and not just submit a website query or have to pay for an international call to the US.
Chris Stevens
Sales Engineer
Extensis Europe
Comment by - October 25, 2008 on 7:12 pm
We will soon be releasing TypeDNA - a completely new font manager and are open for those interested in applying for Beta testing. We will also be demonstrating at MacWorld in January 09. Pricing has not yet been fixed, but it will be competitive to other Font Managers, both in terms of dollar and European pricing.
Quoting our website: “TypeDNA is a robust, standalone Font Manager and plug-in set that seamlessly integrates with all of the most common host applications including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Microsoft Office. Once integrated, TypeDNA significantly enhances your application’s font capabilities. For example, anyone can integrate TypeDNA with Adobe Photoshop to access a unique algorithm set that analyzes, matches and mixes similar font features. Combined, these grant anyone the power to FIND / SORT / CHOOSE / COMBINE and MANAGE fonts quickly and easily without having to understand formal typography rules.”
Soon we will release some web based flash tools allowing designers to play around with our algorithms. These will illustrate how different TypeDNA is to other Font Managers.
Darren Glenister
Development Director
Typedna
Comment by - October 26, 2009 on 10:01 am
Consider also the possibility that a big driver of the pay gap increase was the 10-20 million illegal aliens, mostly without skills or more than a high school education, that have come to the U.S. and driven down wage rates at the lower income, manual labor level.
Comment by Steave Thomason - January 22, 2010 on 11:57 am
It was rather interesting for me to read the article. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything connected to them. BTW, why don’t you change design :).
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