Insider Software’s FontAgent Pro 3 is the successor to last year's Macworld Showtime Best of Show Award winner. FontAgent Pro is a Mac OS X native application that provides integrated font management, diagnostics, optimization, and repair. This upgrade adds font management and performance features, as well as management tools for administrators and IT managers.

Highlights of this release include:

·        Live searching and filtering of font metadata—with a search feature that examines fonts, weights, italics, families, libraries, foundries, and custom comments, and filtering that can include activation date, shared date, and file format;

·        User-configurable startup sets that let you to create and maintain an unlimited number of startup sets;

·        A Setup Wizard that walks you through installation and setup;

·        A new interface design that allows you to create and activate libraries and font sets by dragging and dropping them;

·        Multiple WYSIWYG font views;

·        The ability to protect sets and libraries from accidental deletion;

·        The ability to create standard environments with lockable startup sets and preferences;

·        Increases in auto-activation speed and database performance;

·        A new font diagnostic algorithm improves performance and font-checking; and,

·        Automatic database optimization.

FontAgent Pro 3 also allows administrators and IT managers to prevent users from adding, removing, and renaming fonts, sets, and libraries, and to lock configuration settings for startup sets and preferences.

"FontAgent Pro's rich feature set, extensive administrative controls and speed of deployment have been made possible by our use of Cocoa, the most advanced desktop application framework available," said Insider Software VP of Sales and Marketing Robert Leeds. "Creating Cocoa applications with Xcode is faster and more affordable than any other desktop solution available. It is powerful and elegant, and writing for it is as natural and intuitive as application development can get."

"We're delighted with how the power, open development environment and core graphics capabilities of Mac OS X have been harnessed to address the needs of the creative community," said Apple VP of Worldwide Developer Relations Ron Okamoto. "FontAgent Pro 3 provides an excellent example of an application with a great depth of features enabled by Mac OS X."

FontAgent Pro 3 requires Mac OS X version 10.2 or later, 3MB of disk space, and 7MB of memory.

FontAgent Pro 3 has a suggested retail price of $99.95, but can be downloaded for just $89.95 from Insider Software’s Web site. FontAgent Pro Workgroup Edition with serverless font sharing is priced at $129.95. Those with earlier versions of FontAgent Pro can upgrade to Version 3 Standalone Edition for $49.95. Upgrades to the workgroup edition are $64.95.