Elegant iTunes-style font management tool

One of the strongest aspects of the Mac is the range and elegance of its fonts but these often stay hidden away deep inside OS X until you need them.

Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant management system so that your fonts get the same exposure and treatment as anything else stored on your system, such as multimedia files. Its developer has labeled it as ‘iTunes for fonts’ and while that may be stretching it, you can see where they’re coming from.

Of course, you can use FontExplorer on the Mac but Fontcase provides an altogether richer and more spectacular management experience. At the beginning, you’re prompted to import all of your fonts which takes quite a while and there’s a lot of hanging around while it processes them all. When you’re done however, you can start browsing although again. The program works surprisingly slowly for what is basically a font manager. You can search fonts via a search box in the top-right of the interface and scroll through your fonts a little bit like you would do with photos in Picasa. Searching is helped by the fact that you can tag fonts.

You may experience some stability issues, however. On importing the fonts, Fontcase completely froze for me, which was rather annoying as the whole process had taken a good 5 minutes to begin with.

Fontcase is a powerful and elegant app but it needs to be a lot quicker and stable before I’d be persuaded to use it over FontExplorer.