Fontshuffle for font junkies everywhere
The world for type junkies just got a load better. FontShop Berlin has announced the release of Fontshuffle, a type specimen catalog for iphones and the ipod touch.
So, with our type junky hands trembling with anticipation, we downloaded, installed and got a font fix and it was good and really bad too. First of all, you can dynamically display any text, in any font by simply typing it in, which will be fabulous when showing a client. On this same screen there is a camera icon, press it and it snaps a pretty picture of the current text and saves it to your photo album. Which we think is cool.
Not so cool is the fact you can only view 6 fonts at a time and worse still they’re chosen at random. This is a crappy feature, much better would have been all the fonts in category, organized alphabetically, so you could scroll through them. As the application stands to list more fonts you have shake the phone or press the shuffle button at the bottom, which is plain dumb.
Talking of dumb there is no way to defining the font size across an entire list. Instead Fontshuffle sets each one at a random size, thus making an accurate comparison between fonts impossible. Instead defining one font size for the entire list would have been simpler and worked better.
Also dumb is the lack of a global search to quickly find a font and test it!
However, What’s super duper good is you can access the glyph chart by rotating the iPhone to the horizontal position. From here you simply slide your finger to the left or right to view the glyph charts of the previous and next fonts.
Overall, this in an application that is not finished. The interface feels half-baked, the fonts aren’t crisp, the interface and icon is ugly and don’t even get us started on the fact it crashed. However, we really want to see this little application evolve, FontShop has taken a bold step and we’re looking forward to the next release, sans the issues of course.
Tags: Applications, Fonts, Typography