Typeset: See Your Fonts, Make Them Shine

Typeset is a brave little application that takes on a particularly interesting challenge. That challenge is being a partner/replacement for Apple’s Font Book. It has often been said, that as a indie developer, it’s dangerous to make software that might be stepped on.

Sure, you might be able to compete with other indie software companies, but when it’s the mighty Apple that we’re talking about, boy will it be rough (see Cabel’s experience). Yet competing on Apple’s turf is exactly what Typeset has done, and I think they’ve done a good job of it.

I began thinking about Typeset at this year’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC). It was during WWDC that I was lucky enough to hang out with Coca Developer and Visual Designer Drew Hamlin, most famously associated with Delicious Monster in the past and Facebook more recently. I was struck by how much of a friendly and bright guy Drew is, and left the party trying to remember the other app that he was involved in. A little bit of searching revealed Drew’s connection to Waterfall Software and the very interesting font viewer application, Typeset.

Typeset is in a lot of ways a program created so you can get to know your fonts better. You can easily view your fonts in any number of ways to find your favorites, learn information about them or group them into relevant collections. Moreover if you’ve downloaded or have been emailed a font by a colleague and aren’t sure if it’s worth keeping, you can quickly view that font in Typeset without the need to install it anywhere on your Mac.

With it’s silky smooth interface and great layout,Typeset feels like what Apple’s Font Book application should’ve been. The layout of the user interface just seems a lot more natural than that of Font Book. Like Waterfall Software claims, you can “Adjust Everything”. The font viewer window is very flexible, allowing adjustments of font size, color and background color, dividers between fonts and alternative tones behind subsequent fonts. Although Typeset’s interface looks great from the get go, you can tune it to your needs even and make it look even better in just seconds.

Typeset’s Font Identifier is a very interesting feature that I never realized I needed until I had tried it. Say you were making a web site and wanted to use the same font as Daring Fireball, but what font does DF use? I can think of three easy ways of discovering what font was used. First you could poke around in the DF’s CSS files to try and find the right font.

Second, you could copy and paste some of the font into Pages and look at the text inspector to discover the font type. Finally, and recently my favorite method, you could drag and drop some text onto Typeset’s Font Identifier, discover which font it is you were looking for and then mark it as a favorite in Typeset for later use. Ah… Verdana. Unfortunately, the Font Identifier is not a magic silver bullet, it won’t be able to extract what a font is from within an image or a scanned image of text.

I should mention briefly that I love Typeset’s implementation of favorites. Beside every font is a small heart that clicking upon ‘favorites’ that font. It might sound like sort of a juvenile way of approaching favorites but I think it’s much more tactile and approachable than the standard drop-down “gear” menu method of ‘favoriting’ used in the Mac OS X font inspector. To put it in perspective, in all my years working around Mac OS X text inspectors I’ve never fav’ed a font; after loading up Typeset finding my favorites was the first thing I did… and it was even a bit fun.

Waterfall software suggests using Typeset as your viewer while still relying on Font Book for your font managing needs. Again, this is an area in which I think they have really excelled. Between Typeset and Font Book you really have everything you need. Waterfall Software makes the relationship as seamless as possible by making font collections created in Typeset usable in Font Book and vice versa. Yet great integration aside, I wish Waterfall had decided to make Typeset the “complete package”.

Typeset is so close to being the prefect solution, it may eventually evolve into such. Particularly lacking from Typeset’s features are three things. Typeset’s font properties lacks the “Description” category that is available in Font Book. This isn’t a serious offense but will drive me to have to go back to Font Book when I want to see the font creators comments about a given font. The lack of font validation in Typeset again could drive some more hardcore users back to Font Book. Finally, and simple enough to fix, Typeset has no “Reveal Font in Finder” option, something I find myself using fairly often.

Over all, though, Typeset is excellent. The user experience is very pleasant. The UI is very easy to figure out and master. My only reservations have to do with whether or not there is “room” for an app like this in a lot of people’s tool belt of purchased shareware, especially with free options like Linotype FontExplorer X. I really think it would be great if Apple purchased Typeset from Waterfall, making it an integrated replacement for Font Book…

But, that said, most users touch Font Book rarely enough that I’m not sure many average consumers would even notice if that happened. Typeset might not be for everyone but I recommend you try it out, especially if you work extensively with font and text at all. I didn’t think I would find a real use for it, but was pleasantly surprised that I have and enjoyed the experience. You can pick Typeset up for $12.95 here.

Pros:

• Does nearly everything it is intended to do very well
• Preview uninstalled fonts easily
• Fantastic UI layout and design
• Font identifier is an interesting concept

Cons:

• Perhaps a slightly high price for what remains a font viewer
• Sadly is not made to be a complete Font Book Killer

share permalink ping 4 Comments