FontSight™ Font menu for OS X Cocoa apps.
Company: Stone Design Price: $19 (Direct Shareware) Requirements: Any OS X Cocoa app Reviewer: Brian Peat 4/29/03

If you're sick of always having to scroll endlessly through that multi-column Fonts Panel in Keynote (or any other Cocoa app in OS X) you'll want to take a good look at FontSight™ from Stone Design. This little system patch gives ANY Cocoa application a REAL font menu.

Installation takes only a few seconds, and all you need to do is relaunch your application of choice. Clicking on the FontSight™ menu displays a long WYSIWYG font menu along with a copyright notice and an About box item.

Choosing About FontSight™ brings up an About box with several buttons in it:

You can see from the drop box what prefs are available. You can choose to have the FontSight menu appear under the Format menu instead of up on the menubar taking up space, which is a nice touch, and you can set it to group your fonts in families or in one long list. The families feature will make users of Adobe's Font Reunion very happy.

While all these features are nice, I was surprised to not see a Font Size menu included. This means (for Keynote users at least) you still need to have the Fonts Panel open, although you can compress it down pretty small and use the size slider to set your font sizes.

Since I was curious as to WHAT FontSight™ did to my system I did a simple find for anything with the name FontSight in it and discovered that FontSight™ actually makes images of each font and saves them in a cache folder inside the Application Support folder. Pretty cool trick.

KeynoteUser Opinion
While this is a great little utility, we'll wait for Stone Design to figure out how to add a Font Size menu to it before we shell out $19. Overall though, it's pretty handy, especially since it works in all Cocoa apps with little or no tinkering needed.