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| Review - Extensis' Suitcase X1 | | Date Created: 09 Oct, 2004, 09:22 PM |
 When you hear the words "font manager" you almost always associate it with Suitcase from Extensis. That's one of the perks of being in the font management business longer than anyone else.
I remember using Suitcase in the days of Mac OS 7.x and 8.x (before I moved on to Adobe's ATM Deluxe which I considered a much better font management program). Many of us have used Suitcase at one time or another. It's hard to compete with a company who has had such wide exposure to professional (and semiprofessional) design and/or graphics market on both platforms. |
 A few years ago Extensis bought Font Reserve from DiamondSoft, Inc.. Font Reserve was the next largest font management program besides Suitcase. Around the same time, the world of Macintosh went UNIX on us with the first release of OS X. And at that same time, the third largest font manager, ATM Deluxe stopped being developed to my great disappointment.
Note: You can read more about the Font Reserve acquisition by Extensis in the Font Reserve 3 Review article on this website.
All that was left for commercial font management, not controlled by Extensis, was MasterJuggler from Alsoft and FontAgent Pro from Insider Software which are much smaller players in the cross-platform font management market. In fact Extensis now claims that 98 percent of the professional font management market uses Extensis font management products.
And I have to give them a great deal of credit. They have very successfully made the case for professional font management software -- especially for the Mac OS which really needs it. Suitcase X1 is certainly better than using no font management software. And it's better than using Apple's Font Book. If you've tried Apple's free Font Book (included with OS 10.3) and have switched to Suitcase X1, you make a move in the right direction. (I'll talk more about Font Book in the article named "Review - Apple's Font Book" in the Font Management section of Font Geek.) |
 Suitcase has it's pros and cons. I'm not going to go into all of them because I don't want this article to scroll for 4 screens. Let's take a look at some of the most notable ones...
I like the way Suitcase X1 previews and organizes styles.
I dislike how Suitcase X1 needs to startup before everything else and has to stay running in order for other programs to use fonts.
I like that Suitcase X1 has a menu option/feature to diagnose and fix fonts.
I dislike that the menu option/feature to diagnose and fix fonts in Suitcase X1 doesn't work very well and that running it doesn't produce satisfactory results.
I like the Suitcase X1 interface. It makes sense and it's easy to understand.
I dislike how long Suitcase X1 takes to start-up if there are a lot of fonts indexed in the Suitcase database.
I like that Suitcase X1 auto-activation plug-ins work so well.
I dislike the poor way that the System font management feature works in Suitcase X1.
I like that Suitcase X1 catches some problems when you add fonts to Suitcase that Apple's Font Book doesn't catch.
I dislike that Suitcase X1 misses some/other font problems when you add fonts to Suitcase.
Note: To Extensis' credit they do bundle Morrison Soft Design's Font Doctor X with their product in an attempt to deal with those kinds of problems. (See the article "Review - Font Doctor" in the Font Management section of Font Geek for more about Morrison Soft Design's Font Doctor X.)
I like that Suitcase X1 is made by a company that has expanded very successfully into the digital asset management business. It should mean that Extensis is moving toward better control of all digital assets on your computer.
I dislike that Suitcase X1 is made by a company that has expanded very successfully into the digital asset management business. In my experience Extensis/Suitcase customer service and "focus" seems to be lost for the small designer and/or design group.
If you have a good (fairly clean) font library and you want a font manager that gives you the ability to not have all of your fonts on at once -- using manual and auto-activation functionality -- then Suitcase X1 may be a good solution for you. It's competitively priced and there is no shortage of people who know how to use it who can help you get started.
But if you have serious font problems and you need font cleaning and sorting as well as normal font management, then this program may come up a bit short for you.
All in all I like Suitcase X1. All of the basic core functionality of a professional level font manager are covered, conceptually. Now all Extensis needs to do is to work out some of the implementation issues behind the promise of some of their features. |
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Software Developer........................................Extensis
Current Version...............................................v11.0.4
License Type....................................................Commercial
Full Version Price............................................$99.95
Upgrade Version Price...................................$49.95
System Requirements.....................................Mac OS X 10.2.6 - 10.3.5
Type of Software.............................................font management
Font Geek Rating............................................3.5 out of 5 |
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Bottom Line Comparison: Suitcase compares very closely to Font Reserve which is also now made by Extensis. Of these two, I think Font Reserve is probably a little better. Close behind these two offerings from Extensis is Alsoft's MasterJuggler. All of these, in my opinion, are a great deal better than Apple's own Font Book. But none of these programs work as well as the most current version of Insider Software's FontAgent Pro.
For a more in-depth comparison please see the article named "Font Management Shoot Out" in the Font Management section of Font Geek. |
An Invitation To Extensis
To the good folks at Extensis... If you have a new release or a beta version of Suitcase that you would like me to review (as well as any other literature) that addresses some of these problems, please contact me. I would be happy to try out any new release and post an updated review if warranted. |
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