The big question about the merger was, “Will it work?” Now that I’ve tested Suitcase Fusion, I can answer the question with a relieved, “Yes.” Veteran Font Reserve users (I’ll call them Font Reservists) may miss aspects of their old font manager, but Suitcase Fusion is as fast if not faster than earlier versions, and it’s added features that creative professionals - even Font Reservists - will appreciate. It’s taken Extensis almost three years to merge the two into one, called Suitcase Fusion. Once competitors with very different approaches to font management, they became uneasy roommates when Extensis acquired Font Reserve in 2003.

It is the only way to deal with customer expectations in terms of “free” OS compatibility updates.You might call Extensis Suitcase and DiamondSoft Font Reserve the Odd Fellows of the software world. That is why application vendors “force users to upgrade” to get OS compatibility fixes.īy the way, this issue is one of those which has been effectively forcing application vendors towards subscription models.

The cost in time and effort (as well as opportunity costs) to develop and test application OS compatibility updates is tremendous. But somehow they expect the application vendors to somehow just accommodate any arbitrary (and capricious?) incompatible changes that OS vendors make to suit their own needs. Is that what should be necessary? NO! But very few if any users complain to the OS vendors about this. In migrating your computer system to a major new OS release (whether it be MacOS 10.8 to 10.9 or Windows XP to Windows 7) or new hardware that requires such a new OS release, you should simply assume that you may need to update some major portion of your existing application software. Unless you license a product with a maintenance contract that includes support for future incompatible operating systems changes, it is fairly unreasonable to expect that application software developers are going to develop “fixes” for older software versions to re-establish OS compatibility. Most unfortunately, this clearly has not been the modus operendi of some current operating system developers. In the “old days,” reputable operating system providers designed new operating system versions such that existing applications would run as-is with full performance and full functionality under the new OS version.

What do you actually expect from Extensis? Extensis recently told this to me in an email and why one can only guess that they wish to force users to upgrade. Its also telling that since that Suitcase Fusion 4 wasn't tested on Mavericks operating system. However, since version 4 has preformed so badly we would think twice before upgrading. I would usually agree that any version is usually better than the previous and I'm sure Suitcase 5 has some great features.

Extensis suitcase fusion 6 upgrade