Bohemian Coding and Laurent Baumann have updated Fontcase (http://www.bohemiancoding.com/?Fontcase), a font manager for Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, to version 1.5. The new version adds auto-activation, duplicates detection, a speed increase and stability, among other things.

Fontcase focuses on metadata. For every font and weight, you can add a variety of metadata. You can set tags, genres, assign designers and foundries and more. They are not just pieces of text, but actually show up in the source list, right under your smart collections. Everything in the interface can be dragged.

Fontcase has several preview options. You can preview fonts with any sample text you want and you can view individual glyphs, as a waterfall text and as body text. If you want to go in more detail, there's a special Compare mode which was designed to compare a small set of fonts and allow you to choose the right font from them.

Just like in iTunes, you can share your Library with other people. However, in Fontcase other people can also download fonts from your vault. You not only share fonts but also the associated metadata.

Fontcase costs US$55 for new users. Version 1.5 is a free update for registered users.