FontBook™ app review: the compendium of typefaces

FontBook™

 

Price: $0.99

 

FontBook™ is a complete compendium of fonts and typefaces. It was last updated on January 24, 2013.

 

User Experience
FontBook™ is your complete source for all things text related. It is a very handy and simple to use app with extensive search functions that allow you to view and compare over more than 36,000 typefaces in more than 8000 font families from around the world. The efficient search engine allows you to find specific fonts or you can search through each one individually and there are complete examples of each type of font which gives you a very good perception of what that font would look like while in use.

Favorite fonts can be stored in your favorites list for quick retrieval at a later time. The search engine was recently updated to allow for searches containing practical and stylistic requirements which further aids in finding fonts that match your criteria.

 

Features
Fonts are divided into categories which are broken down further into other categories such as font foundries, year, usage, class, and designer. Those categories are further broken down into several smaller categories and so on.

The built-in search engine is fast and efficient and can search based on specific criteria which brings you the results you were looking for with less unwanted results to sift through. This app receives frequent updates as new typefaces are discovered and added to the compendium which keeps your information as up-to-date as possible.

 

Update Info
During the last update to Version 3.0.2 there were some performance improvements for all 3rd generation iPad users and various bug fixes.

 

Customer Ratings and Feedback Comments
This app has received 12 reviews since the last version update and has received an average score of three stars out of five. Most of the customers find this app to be very detailed and useful; however, there are several complaints about the performance on the earlier iPad models despite the performance updates received in the last revision. This could explain the lower than expected rating of three stars but the app is a good performer in all other areas and could potentially earn a better rating as performance updates are awarded.

 

Personal Comments by Reviewer
This app as mentioned is very thorough and exhaustive in its content and is very easy to navigate thanks to its very clean and user friendly interface. The most recent updates to the search engine make it far more efficient at finding the specific types of fonts you are looking for which makes finding examples of the text much quicker. The overlay functions on the iPad version  which allow you to lay multiple font types over top of one another is a fantastic feature and allows you to compare several similar fonts very quickly. Overall I felt the app was a little on the slow side for performance but the huge volume of content is well worth the few extra seconds it can take to navigate.

 

Pros

• Very exhaustive content
• Efficient search engine
• Font overlay for quick comparison

Cons

• Very poor performance on older devices
• Possibly too many fonts to look at

 

For: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad with iOS 5.0 or later. FontBook™ is optimized for iPhone 5.