Font Management

Once installed, Font Explorer X imports all your fonts and allows you to easily manage them. You can create font sets and activate and deactivate font sets. A font set is simply a collection of fonts. You can use font sets to organize your fonts by type (serif, sans-serif) by project (xxx website, yyy brochure) or by preference (favorites, less-used).

When you’re working on a project, you can create a project font set and then activate it and the fonts are immediately available in all your apps. When you’re done, just deactivate the font set an you no longer see those fonts in your apps.

Just like activating and deactivating sets, you can also activate/deactivate individual fonts. I went through my scaled-down collection and deactivated 284 of 647 fonts, most of which were fonts I rarely or never use. Deactivating these fonts led to decreased load times in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Font Selection

Font Explorer X allows you to preview how text renders in different fonts at the same time. You enter some text and choose the various fonts to compare, thus making it easy to find just the right font you are looking for.

Font Discovery

But what if you can’t find that perfect font? Well, Linotype, a huge font foundry, has tightly integrated their font store, allowing you to browse and purchase fonts inside the app.

Say you download a cool company brochure and you’d like to know what fonts they used. Font Explorer X’s “detect fonts in documents” feature will tell you. You can use it to discover the fonts used in rtf, eps, pdf, pages, key, and indd files.

While I like the discovery features of Font Explorer X, they have overlooked one important way to find fonts: scanning images. MyFonts has a great page where you can upload an image (or provide an image URL) and they will scan the image and tell you want fonts are in it. I frequently use this when I come across a webpage that has a cool font I’d like to buy.

The Verdict

Font Explorer X has made my design life much better. My apps are faster and I can easily manage and select fonts. As I mentioned above, I would really like to see an image scanner added to font discovery. Other than that, I have no complaints about this app and have really enjoyed using it. 4 out of 5 stars.

What do you use to manage your font collection?

Convoluted Pages

My main problem with the Zappos.com site is the clutter. Take a look at the homepage, it has way too much going on: there are two search bars, a bunch of promos and ads, a sitemap-like list of links, a long list of product reviews, and a footer that is bigger than many homepages. The result? You get a site that is 4,371 pixels tall that is hard for the user to navigate. For the average user (1024×728 resolution), that’s at least 6 full screens of stuff on the Zappos.com homepage.

Seriously, how many users scroll down past 1,000, much less 2,000 or 3,000 pixels? Zappos should take a look at one of Google’s many sites to get an idea of how to build a clean, simple page that clearly indicates what action the user should take.

The Zappos interior pages aren’t any better. The Zappos site is only 740 pixels wide, but they decided to cram three rails in, leaving little room for product photos and details.

Zeta Version

The zeta version has significantly reduced the clutter, both on the homepage and interior pages. The result is a clean, simple site that makes it easy for people to find shoes.

There’s still room for improvement, though. For example, the footer is still way too big and the sidebar is filled with corporate info and links that aren’t relevant.

Right now, the old Zappos site often redirects you to the new zeta site (when searching for example), so I wonder why they don’t completely replace the old site. Regardless, the zeta version is a big improvement and should help boost traffic and sales.

What are your thoughts on their new site?

But the name “hijack” makes you think there’s something sinister there. And indeed there is. The app lets you record audio from streaming video sites like Hulu or record entire songs streamed off music sites like Last.fm or Pandora.

While I think Hijack has some cool uses, like recording Skype calls, it has the potential to be used to sidestep DRM schemes. I did a test run and sure enough I was able to easily record songs streamed from Last.fm. Here’s the first 30 seconds I recorded of a popular Radiohead song.

What do you think: is this a legit app or just a tool to pirate copyrighted content?

I tested out KeePassX on my Mac to see if it would give me a more secure way to store my passwords. KeePass uses AES or Twofish encryption to secure a master database of all your passwords. You have one password you need to remember to open the database and access all your passwords. Keypass generates very secure passwords (HjVgF4P3si0et6KnDLxZrxu5n) of various lengths with or without special characters for you to use on websites.

What I like: KeePass eliminates two vulnerabilities: KeePass’ generated passwords make it virtually impossible for people to guess your password and it securely encrypts your passwords should someone ever gain access to your computer.

What I don’t like: Unlike the Windows version, KeePassX doesn’t have an auto-fill hotkey. That means every time you want to log into a site, you have to have KeePass open, switch to KeePass, copy the password, switch back to your browser, and paste the password. This is way too much work.

Due to this lacking feature, I won’t be using KeePass for my regular passwords. However, for certain passwords like my bank account I would consider using KeePass. The down side is that I have to have KeePass to retrieve my password. If I’m on another computer, I won’t be able to login.

Bottom line is I’m still looking for a strong password protection tool. What do you use to secure your passwords?

Things  

Things might be the most popular task management app on the Mac, especially after they released an iPhone version (costs $9.99). You can quickly brain dump your to-dos in an inbox, drag tasks between lists, and create areas of responsibilities to assign tasks to. Things provides a hotkey key to quickly add tasks no matter where you are. The only downside is you have Things open for this shortcut to work.

I would have given Things a better rating if it weren’t for two things. First, I would like to be able to publish my task lists for others to see. I need my boss at ATDC to be able to see what’s in my queue.  Things provides calendar and iPhone synching but no publishing. Second, Things is beta software (a paid version is coming soon) and as such it has a few bugs. It’s fine to have bugs or missing features, I just found it annoying that Things kept telling me when I tried to do something it couldn’t handle:

Remember the Milk

Like Things, Remember the Milk provides many task management features, like multiple task lists, due dates, tagging, and notes. Where Remember the Milk really shines though is in its integration with other services, like Twitter, Gmail, and mobile devices. You can even call an 800 number to leave a voice message that will be transcribed into a task (via Jott). Remember the Milk has the most services of any task management software I’ve seen, including the ability to share or publish task lists.

While all these services are great, it makes me think the Remember the Milk team is spending more time on services instead of on the interface. There are many features the site lacks. I can’t drag and drop tasks, drag a priority level onto a task, or click a calendar to add a due date (you must manually enter the date). These are things I due on a regular basis and I’ve found it very irritating they haven’t made the site easier to use.

Zenbe

Zenbe has a very simple web and iPhone task management system. In fact, if you don’t have an iPhone, this solution won’t work for you. Zenbe’s main product is a cloud-based Outlook replacement, with email, calendar, contacts and tasks. But, they also have a free iPhone app for task mangement that has its own web interface. I don’t use the Outlook features — I only use the iPhone app and interface.

What Zenbe lacks in features, it makes up for in simplicity. You can’t add notes, URLs, or priorities to tasks. You can only create a task, set a due date and share task lists with others. I like the simplicity but would like to see a way to prioritize tasks beyond due dates.

ActionGear

ActionGear is the lightest task management app I tried, just over a megabyte in size. ActionGear adds a small icon to your taskbar and is activated by a hotkey. Its small footprint allows you to always keep it running so you quickly pull it up to add a task. ActionGear is beta software is a great start for only a couple months of development work. But it is lacking some must-have features, like prioritizing tasks, setting due dates, and sharing your lists.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is a very sophisticated task management app. OmniFocus is built around capturing, organizing and contextualizing tasks. This is great if you have many projects with many tasks. You can add contexts (similar to tags) to tasks and switch between project and context view. These added features make it more useful than Things, but do not justify its hefty price tag ($79.95/license). Why pay $80 for basic functionality that is provided by other free apps? If I’m going to pay more than $20 for task management software, it better have an iPhone app and let me share my lists.

What’s the verdict?

Most of these apps have the same core functionality: adding, prioritizing and organizing tasks. Where they really differ is in the services they provide (or lack thereof) and their sharing capabilities. I enjoyed using Things and Remember the Milk the most, but Zenbe is a new contender that just might win me over. Zenbe’s free service and iPhone app make it a great solution. But without the ability to prioritize tasks, I can’t switch to Zenbe just yet. For the time being, I’m going to use Remember the Milk as it lets me prioritize and share tasks.

What task management app do you use?