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| Review - STC fontBrowser 2.0 | | Date Created: 02 Jan, 2005, 07:08 PM |
| Fellow Font Geek Scott Stoel showed me a cool website that I thought I'd share with Font Geek's readers... |
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| The name of the site/Flash 6 application is fontBrowser 2.0 from STC Associates. It's a web based Flash 6 application that shows you all of your active/loaded fonts through any OS and browser that supports the Flash 6 (or higher) browser plug-in. |
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| It's a very simple site. When you click onto the site it shows all of your active fonts along the left and allows you to preview them right in the browser. |
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It even allows you to change the text, change the size, compare two different sizes and even save your font preview settings right inside your browser window.
I e-mailed Jerome Maurey-Delaunay, Director of Interactive Design for STC Associates (an Integrated Marketing/PR firm who host and own, among other things, fontBrowser 2.0) to find out more about this Flash 6 application. According to Jerome, who wrote fontBrowser in late 2002/early 2003, fontBrowser was an experiment with one of Flash's capabilities (getting the list of fonts active on the host computer).
Jerome was kind enough to share the following info with me/Font Geek...
Jerome: "The only requirement for running the application is the Flash Player version 6 and up."
Jerome: "Macromedia has plugins for most OSs (Windows, Mac OS 9/X and various Linux Distributions). This is one of the strengths of flash application development, cross browser/platform compatibility."
Jerome: "After a couple of posts on Macromedia.com and other message boards the fontBrowser became a popular tool and was even featured in the lockergnome newsletter. The logs show that well over 100,000 people used it in 2004."
Jerome: "Thank you for the interest in the fontBrowser and Happy New Year! |
| A few things that I noticed about this great little flash application was that it was fast and efficient. It displayed my fonts perfectly -- in fact it showed me that I was having some problems with some of my fonts (jagged display) that I didn't know I was having. I ran diagnostics on the ones that looked bad and sure enough the fonts were not in good shape. |
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Software Developer...................................Jerome Maurey-Delaunay
Current Version..........................................v. 2.0
Type of Software........................................freeware
System Requirements.................................Flash 6 or higher
Type of Utility.............................................Font Display Utility
Font Geek Rating........................................4.5 out of 5 |
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Comparison: Of course the Mac OS has it's own way of previewing fonts. If you don't own a third party font management program you can preview any font on your system with Font Book. And if you do own a third party font manager, you should also be able to use it to view samples of your fonts. So although this program isn't necessary, it's still interesting. And the fact that it's cross platform and free is pretty darn cool.
Additional Notes:
Jerome has developed other Flash apps that might be of interest.
TimeTracker, a simple task tracking/reporting application (Also flash v6):
http://www.stcassociates.com/lab/timetracker.html
He's also working on a quicktime/shoutcast mp3 stream flash player: http://www.fnckmachine.com/fnckradio/. The idea for this application is to be able to stream online radio content without having to have to install any applications. According to Jerome, this is an early version but should be "...fun once completed..." and "...perfect for users dealing with restrictive IT people ;)..." |
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