AppFlow

As a web designer I spent a lot of time working with type, and as a result I build up some large collections of type very quickly, and this is a problem I share with graphic designers and others in all sorts of industry world wide.  With 533 active fonts, I have a lot to sort through, and expect to be able to do so with ease.

Font Book and FontCase both do essentially the same thing, make it easy for you to manage the fonts that you have installed on your system.  Font Book comes by default with your mac and Fontcase is a 3rd party application that sells for $53 (around £33).

So, the question to be asked is simple.  Is Fontcase worth you extra cash?

Interface

The interface of the application is probably one of the most critical aspects.  It needs to be easy to preview your fonts, active fonts and organise your font library.  Fontcase certainly shines here, although much more complex than Fontbook it does a lot more and shows your fonts in a much better format.

Unlike Font Book, Fontcase shows a small resizable preview of all the fonts on your system which makes it easy to scan through and select the right font for the project in question.  If you were to try and choose a font in Font Book you would find yourself going through the long and slow process of selecting each font individually in order to preview it.

Fontcase feel like it has a much more refined interface than that of Font Book, which I don’t find surprising in the slightest.  In fact, I’d expect that feeling.  Apple have a lot on their hands, so why would they spend a lot of time perfecting the interface of a program that relatively few of their users use.  What Apple have done is to make a basic functional program.  On the other hand Fontcase is a beautiful, streamlined functional program.

Organisation

This is what both of these applications are about: font organisation.  Font Book is rather limited on it’s organisation of fonts.  It can give a list of all fonts, english fonts, user fonts, computer fonts or you can compile a “collection” of your own.

Although the available organisation is limited in Font Book, is should be enough for basic font users who only need limited organisation of their font’s.  For a novice designer this will be more than enough, but how does Fontcase stack up to this?

Well, the Fontcase sidebar is somewhat longer than that o the Font Book one, and is dedicated, like in Font Book, to pure organisation.  Here’s the organisation options available in Fontcase:

• Library
  • Library (everything)
  • Last Import
  • Duplicates
  • Auto Activated
• Smart
  • Activated Fonts
  • Deactivated Fonts
  • My Top Rated Fonts
  • System Fonts
• Tags
  • Web-safe
• Designers
• Languages

As you can tell from the given list, fontcase has a lot more organisation flexibility than Font Book.

Performence

For many designers, system performance is vital.  You can’t have a simple font organisation application hold you back while working.

So, how does Font Book stack up?  Well, as you would expect, it uses 0% CPU while not doing anything.  Perfectly acceptable, I think.  It uses 29.3MB of RAM, so again nothing to speak of.  Small and lightweight, just what we like on any program.

Fontcase on the other hand uses 75.5MB of RAM, but also uses 0% CPU while idle.  This is also very acceptable, especially when you consider that it does so much more than Font Book and allows all the flexibility that you’ll ever need.

Activity Monitor Stats

Conclusion

All in all, I think both are very good applications depending on who you are.  For the professional designer I would recommend using Fontcase of Font Book, but you may as well see if Font Book does the job first anyway.  I mean – it’s free and already on your system.  Fontcase on the other hand comes in at $53, or around £33 at time of writing.

When, and only when, you out-grow Font Book would I recommend upgrading to Fontcase.