Suitcase Fusion 12.1: Update on Lost Luggage

On Thursday, Extensis released an update to its Mac-only font management utility, Suitcase Fusion. The rest of their luggage got lost.

First, the Good News

Originally sched­uled for a mid-June release, Suitcase Fusion 12.1 arrived last Thursday, 6 July 2006. As mid-cycle dot updates go, it’s pret­ty good.

Suitcase is now the lat­est appli­ca­tion to become com­pat­i­ble with Intel-based Macs, allow­ing it to run native­ly on 2006’s PowerBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini gen­er­a­tion of Apple Macintosh com­put­ers. This, com­bined with the updat­ed auto-activation xten­sions for Intel-Mac native XPress 7, is good news for QuarkXPress users. If you aren’t a QuarkXPress user, how­ev­er, or are wait­ing until Apple releas­es pro­fes­sion­al grade desk­top sys­tems with Intel chips inside, Suitcase becom­ing a uni­ver­sal bina­ry is ho-hum.

What might catch your inter­est is its new Transportable Font Vault. Resulting from the com­bi­na­tion of Extensis Suitcase and DiamondSoft Font Reserve, which Extensis pur­chased in 2003, the Font Vault promises–and, for the most part, accomplishes–the elim­i­na­tion of dupli­cate or cor­rupt fonts, and takes on the task of orga­niz­ing fonts on the hard­drive. Users mere­ly drag all their fonts into the Font Vault, where­upon fonts are copied into, and man­aged from the Vault. External font files are no longer need­ed. Font Vault stores them inside, and Extensis expects you to delete the orig­i­nal font files from your disk.

It was a great con­cept, but it had a fun­da­men­tal flaw: The Font Vault was­n’t portable, and, if it became cor­rupt­ed, you lost your entire font library.

With this lat­est update, Extensis has made the Font Vault portable. Now it lives up to its promise. The Font Vault, includ­ing all con­tained fonts and any user-created meta­da­ta, can now be backed up like any oth­er file, or even copied and deployed across mul­ti­ple Macs–both Intel- and PowerPC-based.

Ever con­cerned with the secu­ri­ty of my clients’ and my own dig­i­tal assets, my first ques­tion was, of course: Then Extensis is eas­ing the task of steal­ing a com­pa­ny’s entire font library, reduc­ing the places would-be font thieves must search for fonts on the Mac hard­drive from five places to one? I was assured, how­ev­er, that the Transportable Font Vault includes secu­ri­ty fea­tures to pre­vent just that sort of thing. Though, for obvi­ous rea­sons, Extensis would not go into detail about its anti-theft measures.

The 12.1 update also includes more script­able actions and fea­tures via AppleScript, as well as sup­port for Apple’s Migration Assistant.

In the working-with-Apple depart­ment that’s it, but there’s some­thing else in the update that force­ably removes Apple from the font man­age­ment process. Coyly mar­ket­ed as a “fea­ture for elim­i­nat­ing unex­pect­ed font man­age­ment issues,” Extensis has added the Competitive Products Manager to Suitcase Fusion. What the Competitive Products Manager does is sim­ple: It deac­ti­vates, or locks fonts away from, all oth­er font man­age­ment util­i­ties, includ­ing Apple’s FontBook, which is a native part of OS X since ver­sion 10.3.

A bold move for Extensis, con­sid­er­ing its near total depen­dence on the Mac plat­form (see below), the Competitive Products Manager is nonethe­less a pos­i­tive inno­va­tion for users who often strug­gle with unpre­dictable doc­u­ment font usage and oth­er issues result­ing from the double-management of both Suitcase and FontBook.

Users can also look for­ward to slight­ly faster font acti­va­tion both with­in the Suitcase user inter­face as well as via the auto-activation plug-ins for InDesign, QuarkXPress, and oth­er cre­ative applications.

Lost Luggage, aka the Bad News

Last May, in between my ses­sions at the InDesign Conference in Chicago, I sat down with Halstead York, Extensis’s prod­uct man­ag­er for Suitcase and the entire Extensis font man­age­ment line. In addi­tion to a delight­ful con­ver­sa­tion about the future of font man­age­ment, QuarkXPress ver­sus InDesign in var­i­ous pub­lish­ing work­flows, and the best place to get a gen­uine Chicago-style hot dog, we wast­ed a lot of time talk­ing about Suitcase.

York and Extensis were very excit­ed about the upcom­ing 12.1 update. It’s a good update–for single-user, Mac desk­top font management–but it bla­tant­ly ignores two very impor­tant groups: Windows users and work­groups on either platform.

The lat­est ver­sion of Suitcase Server for Macs is X1 (eleven), released in October 2004, and, worse, Suitcase Fusion is not a com­pat­i­ble client of Suitcase Server X1. While I don’t know the sales fig­ures for Suitcase Server, and Extensis would not dis­close them, any cre­ative work­group with three or more cre­atives using more than a hand­ful of fonts real­ly should be using server-based font man­age­ment. Extensis, of course, more or less agrees with me there. Why then, are stand-alone desk­top users the only ones ben­e­fit­ting from fea­tures like Font Sense and Font Vault? Sure, indi­vid­ual design­ers can ben­e­fit from these fea­tures, but indi­vid­ual design­ers usu­al­ly have a bet­ter han­dle on their fonts, and have few­er font ver­sion issues, than the mem­bers of 5, 10, or fifty-person work­groups. These fea­tures were made for work­group font man­age­ment, but Extensis isn’t offer­ing them to workgroups.

Suitcase Fusion for OS X was launched in January of 2006 with­out a men­tion of either an impend­ing update to Suitcase Server or a Windows ver­sion of Suitcase Fusion. The 6 July, 2006 press release for the 12.1 update does­n’t men­tion them either. In fact, a quote from Martin Stein, Director of Product Management, implies that these two prod­ucts aren’t even high on Extensis’s pri­or­i­ty list.

“Extensis is excit­ed to release Suitcase Fusion as a Universal Application, bring­ing the best per­for­mance to both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs,” Stein said. “As an orga­ni­za­tion focused on its cus­tomers, it was imper­a­tive to deliv­er these performance-driven updates. We are focused on pro­vid­ing the same qual­i­ty update for our dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment prod­uct, Portfolio, in the near future.”

The phrase “bring­ing the best per­for­mance to both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs” reminds me of the orig­i­nal Blues Brothers movie. When rhythm and blues icons Jake and Elwood Blues, des­per­ate for any venue to play, find them­selves at Bob’s Country Bunker. They ask the bar­maid what kind of live music Bob’s fea­tures. “Oh, we got both kinds,” the bar­maid responds. “Country and Western.”

Could You Describe Your Missing Bags, Sir?

With Fusion being ver­sion 12, the cur­rent three-year-old ver­sion 9 of Extensis Suitcase for Windows is look­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly long in the tooth. 

When I asked if he had noticed all the Dell and Sony Windows-based lap­tops atten­dees of the InDesign Conference had brought to check their e‑mail, fol­low along with ses­sion instruc­tors, and even to do their design work dur­ing breaks, York con­firmed that he had in fact observed a rise in the num­ber of pro­fes­sion­al cre­atives work­ing on Windows in the last few years. He doubt­ed, how­ev­er, that my expe­ri­ence of hav­ing seen Windows in 40% of the cre­ative work­flows with which I con­sult­ed was typ­i­cal of the mod­ern land­scape. The prob­lem, York said, is not with the num­ber of Windows cre­atives but with the num­ber of com­pet­ing font man­agers avail­able for Windows.

“You mean all the neon-colored, share­ware font view­ers,” I asked, astound­ed that the man­ag­er of Extensis’s font man­age­ment prod­uct line would draw a com­par­i­son to the glut of home-grown down­load­ables on Tucows​.com. His response was a nod.

PB: Are Windows users ever going to see an update to Suitcase?

HY: Yes. In time.

PB: When?

HY: Let’s say with­in a year.

PB: A year? Really? Suitcase 9.2.2 might have some trou­ble with Vista. The Suitcase user inter­face at least isn’t up to the require­ments need­ed to obtain Microsoft’s made-for-Windows Vista stamp of approval. Surely Extensis will update Suitcase for Vista–won’t you?

HY: Well, let’s say with­in a Vista time­frame we should have a new ver­sion of Suitcase for Windows.

PB: Will it have all the fea­tures of Mac Fusion?

HY: I hope so. I can’t say.

PB: And Suitcase Fusion Server for both platforms?

HY: Let’s say with­in a year.

When I pressed for more detail regard­ing the deci­sion to let the next ver­sions of Suitcase Server and Suitcase for Windows wait so long, York remind­ed me of the numer­ous appli­ca­tions for Windows he felt were com­peti­tors for Extensis’s mar­ket­share. Simultaneously he informed me that Extensis felt the rig­ors of cod­ing fea­tures like Font Vault and Font Sense for Windows were daunt­ing. The under­ly­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem archi­tec­ture that Suitcase relies on to accom­plish such tasks, he explained, is vast­ly dif­fer­ent than in OS X, and it’s prov­ing to be a tremen­dous chal­lenge for the pro­gram­mers at Extensis.

I asked York one last ques­tion on the sub­ject: While Extensis is still wait­ing to update Suitcase Server and the Windows ver­sion, now almost two and three years old, respec­tive­ly, aren’t you wor­ried that some­one will come along with their own professional-grade font man­ag­er and snatch up those markets?

Shrugging, he respond­ed: “Not really.”

So, an update to Extensis Portfolio is next while Mac-based work­groups and Windows users mean­der around bag­gage claim won­der­ing if their Suitcases were sent to Bora Bora by mistake.

The 12.1 update is free from the Extensis Website to reg­is­tered Mac users of the stand­alone Suitcase Fusion.