Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops
I have less than 5,000 fonts to manage.
First impressions of RightFont:
...
To show how amazing FontExplorer X Pro really is,
...
This is a big loss for our community.
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Thanks for the mini review, Drew.
You prompted me to look up some other reviews too to see what I might have been missing out on all these years. I hadn't really thought before now about how useful a font manager like this could be. The last font "manager" (if you can even call it that) I used was… Apple's Font Book
, and a few decades before that was… Apple's Font Mover.
This is what my first experience shuffling fonts looked like in the 80s:
(I just took that screenshot from an emulator a few minutes ago because, thanks to 709 mentioning
suitcase fonts, I've been down a deep rabbit hole all afternoon trying to find, extract, and convert some ancient fonts that I'd all but forgotten about.
)
Quote:
Originally Posted by drewprops
It's finally crashing down on my how incredible a tool FontExplorer X Pro really is, and am wondering what led to its downfall?
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This is
complete speculation, but if it's anything like the quiet deaths of other products I've loved over the years, I'd bet on these usual suspects:
a) Maybe the user base is shrinking due to availability of other cheaper tools or due to the inclusion of rudimentary font management in other products (like how Adobe gently pushes you to get fonts through their services). Fewer users might mean less revenue, and it might just not be financially viable to keep supporting the app.
b) Janky old code? FontExplorer has been around for a long time, and I wonder if maintaining some of its existing code now exceeds the cost-benefit equation. Maybe they think the need to toss it and rewrite something new?
c) Greed? I see Monotype is teasing a new
subscription service for enterprise customers. The transition from "pay once" to "pay forever" has certainly helped fill Adobe's coffers.
d) Changes in management leading to changes in priorities? FontExplorer X was originally a Linotype product, and Linotype was consumed by Monotype many years ago, though when FontExplorer X was still young (like 1.x or 2.x). Maybe there were folks inside keeping FontExplorer X alive all this time who recently moved on to other things, and nobody else took up the mantle. This happens depressingly often when corporations buy each other.