I’ve always found Apple’s Font Book application to be the ugly stepsister of the native Apple applications. It just doesn’t have the polish of most Mac applications. It seems everytime I need to find a unique font for a graphic or presentation, Font Book gets in my way.

This is what led me to Bohemian Coding’s Fontcase. Fontcase looks like something designed by Apple. Specifically, if the iTunes team made a font manager, it would look a lot like Fontcase.

The initial Fontcase import is painless. You click one dialog box and Fontcase does the rest. Fontcase can preview both active and inactive fonts. This means you don’t have to load all of your fonts in memory. Instead, you keep them all in Fontcase and activate when needed.

Once imported, you can easily browse and navigate your fonts rating, tagging and organizing as required. The process of scrolling and previewing your fonts is much easier than Font Book. You can even print out previews. Browsing your fonts is also easy. You can quick look a selected font family simply by pressing the space bar. One useful feature is the “compare” button that allows you to compare multiple fonts. I also like the way you can preview a font as body text just in case you are feeling adventurous about replacing Helvitca, although you really probably shouldn’t. If you are on a network with multiple Macs, it also allows you to preview and share fonts through a Bonjour sync.

The developers clearly spent some time on the user interface with this application. Fontcase walks that tightrope of having the tools where you need them without looking too cluttered.

If you are a font nerd, don’t miss this one. A single license for Fontcase is $56 and a family pack of five is $92.

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