NathanBowers.com

Until October 2006 I was a Windows user. I initially got hooked on Mac computers when I borrowed Doug’s old 12” Powerbook for design testing during the building of Newshutch. How an aging Mac laptop with a fading LCD ended my lifetime of Windows use is a matter for another blog post, but for now I’ll just say that Windows’ font management won’t be missed.

Windows 95 font installer:

Windows Vista font installer in 2007:

(as seen in the Vista test drive)

Seriously, after 12 years and millions or billions of dollars and programmer hours this is the font dialog?

Every time a new version of Windows came out I would pray for a decent built in font manager and preview. Eventually (Win 2K maybe?) you could drag font files¹ into the fonts folder and they would be installed (as long as they were the right kind of font file), or you could use the abysmal Adobe Type Manager. In any case the whole process of installing, previewing, and managing type was the worst part of being a Windows-using designer. Even people who aren’t designers love to mess around with type. You’d think Microsoft would have tried to improve the experience.

The larger question is, what has Microsoft been doing with Windows this whole time? I suppose they’ve finally gotten security more or less tightened up, though Active X and the tight coupling of Windows and Internet Explorer are still really bad ideas. Vista does offer gratuitous visual effects and overbearing but ineffective DRM that kills performance, so uh, yay for that.

Notes:

1. Vista throws a warning when you try to drag a font into the font folder.

Full screenshot of Vista’s font installer, font folder, and font previewer.

Screenshot of OS 10.4’s built in font manager. It’s not bad, but when you have as many fonts as I do it’s best to use a dedicated app like Linotype’s free FontExplorer.