As you can clearly tell from the title, FontCard 1.1 is "out" (That's a download link, that it is). Biggest news to this release is it is about 5 to 30 times faster than the first FontCard 1.0.3 released back early this year. Uh, did I just say first? Wonder what I mean by that... According to various tests I've done. If you want to turn on logging for FC, you can see the times yourself. Second biggest news, it now works with Cocoa applications. And it takes about 400 milliseconds to set up too (which is deferred), so that was really fast. Sadly, there is no Cocoa support for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar Version 10.2.8 or earlier because it lacks support for the new menu manipulation methods and Cocoa really hates it when you select a menu item that doesn't exist. Exceptions out the wazoo. Sorry people that use said version of the Mac OS.

The entire backend was rewritten to be all sexy like. So now if an application has multiple font menus, it will use the same one for them all. This means it is faster and it also means that there is no longer a delay every time you open the font menu in InDesign even thought it is evil and destroys the font menu every time it is closed.

Carbon "Show Fonts" support has also been added. This is primarily for BBEdit 8.0 and Tex-Edit Plus. FontCard will look for this menu item and spawn a new submenu off it that shows the font menu. Doesn't matter where it is, FontCard will find it. In Cocoa, FC makes a new item below the Show Fonts command. The difference is due to the fact that Carbon menus are usually index based so adding an item to a menu could cause the program to internally choose the wrong item. Cocoa, however is not index based. However, because Cocoa menus sit on top of Carbon, it has a separate dictionary-like representation of all the menu items. Adding a submenu to the main item would cause it to be lost when the items are resynced (which could be at any time) or it could make the parent menu item stop functioning completely. That'd be bad. This all means that unlike FontSight not only does FC work with all native applications, it is also cheaper. And unlike You Control: Fonts there isn't a list of pre-approved Applications that you can work with. FC should work with all native menus (the font "menus" in Office in the Palettes are not real. If FC doesn't work with an application, then that is a bug and should be reported.

Speaking of Office... There is a fun bug in Word 2004 that completely prevents the font menu from working if WYSIWYG menus is turned off. Doesn't matter if FC is installed or not, it just won't work. Since FC requires WYSIWYG menus to be off in the host application, that made it impossible to use it in Word 2004. No More! FC now sends an AppleEvent to Word, from Word. Sadly, this means the first time you do it, there will be a slight delay as components and things are loaded into Word. Assuming Microsoft fixes the bug in the next update to Word, FC will know what to do.

What else....? Oh, if you don't use your fonts for a while, OS X will empty its cache of them so the next opening of the menu might be a little slow. This isn't due to FontCard, it just appears to be a memory optimization that OS X makes. And you might notice the installer for FC installs an item called com.apple.Recents.collection on some computers. This is because, due to an entirely broken Font Collection API, there is no way to recreate this collection if the user has deleted it or never had it in the first place. I didn't even notice this until some users started asking for a feature I added more than 6 months ago. I kept saying I added it, and they kept saying "No, you didn't. Now shut up and add it." One really nice and patient user was willing to work with me and help me confirm that it really was a bug in OS X. I've filed a bug against almost every function in FontPanel.h. Sigh.

And finally, this new FC uses a new registration scheme. It is painless, free, and secure (SSL Powered!) to update it. Just install FC, the preference pane will open, URU will launch, and you will be asked if you want to update (for those paranoid users out there, automatic updating is not enforced). And we do not capture the MAC address, unlike some other pronoun-named software companies. I'll let Slava or Brian explain why this Serial Number change was necessary.