Fonts as apps

Rodrigo Saiani5 February 2012 · 19:45

What do you think about it?

There's something about it that I think could really work, namely, immediate, hassle-download-free installation for even the less knowledgeable layman, direct to user updates with minor effort (re-installing a font in font book for example presents more steps than anyone other than a designer/font enthusiast would want to bother go through), revisions and multi device licensing (as in installing in every device I'm logged in).

There are platform, store issues etc. but somehow it seems like a very simple, elegant way of making them available to the public.

I think it'd be really cool to have something like that made and work platform independently that would somehow "talk" to your os and do all the dirty work simply and elegantly.

Anyone with me on this?
Cheers
Rodrigo

Hrant H Papazian5 February 2012 · 20:32

Related:
I think it was Roger Black who said (a couple of
years ago now) that fonts should be 99 cents.

hhp

Si_Daniels5 February 2012 · 20:56

It's a shame the mobile OS's make it difficult/impossible to install additional fonts as system wide resources (something traditional OS's have allowed since the 80's) but the first to do so should be able to instantly add 200,000+ new "Apps" to it's app store. :-)

PS. RB's 99 cent concept was presented at TypeCon LA and was related to web fonts.

Riccardo Sartori6 February 2012 · 01:07

Rodrigo Saiani6 February 2012 · 03:01

Hrant, I must agree, and I think .99 could actually make more people buy fonts "on impulse", expand the market and certainly reduce piracy. Of course there's an issue where a crappy product would be leveled with an amazing product, but maybe the sheer ammount of purchases would of course also reflect that gap.

Sil, maybe it should be like iBooks or newsstand, a separate entity or something. And maybe if they do it the "apple way" instead of having to rely on outside, uncurated/unchecked .otf files this lock down on font installing wouldn't happen.

Riccard0 - thanks for the links!

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