The people at Exten­sis are launch­ing the “better, faster, funner (?)” Suit­case Fusion, fea­tur­ing “all new archi­tec­ture, all new open source tech­nol­ogy, all new UI”. From the Exten­sis Com­mu­nity Blog:

The new back-​end means this is not just your aver­age upgrade with some new fea­tures. The SQL-​database makes it very stable with (much) faster search­ing, brows­ing and acti­va­tion. In addi­tion, a new com­po­nent – the “core” – is always run­ning in the back­ground – ensur­ing con­sis­tent font man­age­ment even if you don’t launch the UI. This saves you a LOT of system resources.

Plus, it was built specif­i­cally for Leop­ard and as a result can take advan­tage of all the whiz-​bang capa­bil­i­ties of Leop­ard: smoother dis­play and high-​quality ren­der­ing makes the pre­views truly awesome.

The all-​new auto-​activation plug-​ins are the stars of the pro­duc­tion. These are com­pletely re-​built as well. Yes, they still lever­age FontSense for pre­cise match­ing and yes, they will auto-​activate fonts in linked and embed­ded objects. But they now also com­mu­ni­cate with the core mean­ing you are have 24/7 acti­va­tion and deac­ti­va­tion (why would you not put away your toys to keep the room avail­able for others?).

To announce this new ver­sion Exten­sis have pro­duced a spoof trailer for the imag­i­nary movie Brave­font. It begins with the arche­typal men­ac­ing voice-​over thun­der­ing “In a world torn apart by so many type­faces, only one tool could keep them together.” and then con­tin­ues with piling up movie clichés. Alas, the fake promo is far less clever nor funny than it pre­tends to be, as it doesn’t really gel and comes across as merely a bunch of dis­parate ele­ments. Fur­ther­more the pro­duc­tion values look a bit cheap. Fair enough, it’s just a self-​produced spoof video, but it really falls short when com­pared to sim­i­lar efforts like the glee­ful type comedy Font Con­fer­ence at Col­lege Humor. And if you want to see really funny movie pre­view humour, you should def­i­nitely check Pablo Fran­cisco who met the movie pre­views guy in real life. But I digress.

And then there’s also that one embar­rass­ing detail, at 0:43–0:44. As the voice-​over announces “Brave­font, star­ring Stone Serif, Lucida Black­let­ter, Gill Sans…” the fea­tured fonts zoom towards you. Except, that’s not Gill Sans. That’s Myriad. Yup, the sub­sti­tute font that is inserted when the selected font is not prop­erly loaded. In a promo for font man­age­ment software?

Ouch…

:: U P D A T E ::

I just found out on Jim Kidwell’s blog that “[i]t’s a funny little piece that was mostly cre­ated for the Press. We dropped a bit of audio at the end about call­ing our PR person for inter­views, and thought that it would be fun for every­one else to see.” So I shouldn’t be too harsh on the over­all look of the piece. After all it is what it is. ;)