Hope all you font lovers out there are as excited as we are today. We have released Fontli on the Windows Phones! And with an all-new smashing user Interface! The first truly typography-related application on the Windows app store! Now you see why we are so excited!

The user interface has been completely revamped to use the best of what Windows platform has to offer: the Metro UI. Check out some of the screenshots and you will see they are anything but a clone of Fontli on the iPhone.

What makes us even happier about being on Windows is Microsoft’s own enthusiasm about typography; expressed quite clearly through the unique and bold Metro UI. It is fitting therefore, we felt, to have our font-lovers’ app available on their app store.

Go on, take a look for yourselves!

Script watch

Doing some quick focus at exotic scripts around, we stumbled upon this one from 8th century CE India. The pallava script derived from the Proto Brahmi script seems to have a later influence on the orthographic evolution of South East asian scripts including Khmer and writing systems including Sinhala have its influence. Apparently used as the prevalent script to write Sanskrit prior to the taking over of Nagari/Devanagari scripts post 10th century CE.


Pallava Script

Image: Hand crafted image in Pallava script by Ms. Jayalakshmi P Iyangar with the text jayaM vedasya sArathiM.

PS: Albeit a later developed script, Khmer does show a good degree of similarity with Pallava script. You could check out Google’s Swannaphum Webfont or Freehand as good free flowing unicode compliant type faces for Khmer.

Fontli Focus

The second but never secondary channel that drives the development of wonderful products is the focus on interactions with users, be it product experience or finding more use cases for it based on activity. Keeping this in mind, Fontli decided to focus on certain aspects of the product including but not limited to content generated by users at regular intervals to keep users updated on the Typographic beauties brewing in the environment. As a starter, we would like to present you some recent content shared by our beloved user Mr. Daniel Rico. Active on Fontli with the user handle of Chocopunk, he is a web designer and front end developer since about 2005. An avid lover of Typefaces, Daniel says he picked up his inclination to exotic type faces in his teens thanks to Metal bands’ logos featuring the same.

From the historical French town of Strasbourg, an ideal location for vintage type lovers and photowalk enthusiasts alike, Daniel loves to pick up a good lot of typeface usages all around the city. The types in the most unusual of places be it coffee packaging or bakery boards he feels throw a wonderful window into unique designs and says Fontli is a good window to showcase such less discovered beauties to the Typoholic ecosystem.

App-dates

Thank you dear users for pouring in your suggestions over Twitter, email and other media about what you feel is the trajectory the app and development needs to take. Some, as we mentioned earlier were readily adoptable into the development landscape but some had to wait for a while to be included. Here are some features/fixes to expect in the next update that you can play around within a week’s time.

  1. Picture quality - We have considered your suggestions on the picture quality being a big dampener and felt we needed to reorganise the way we handled pictures. Going forward, you can expect the quality gap to be removed thanks to the back end changes.
  2. Push Notifications - Its here finally!
  3. Comment/Post deletion - Some users had pinged about including the option to delete comments/posts which might have accidentally been posted or for want of edits. We have taken this into consideration and now you can delete existing posts/comments of yours.
  4. Invite Facebook friends - After all what is a social app without social interaction ? We have added the option to invite your friends on Facebook to join you and explore the Typeface arena with you.
  5. Custom text previews - Budding Typeface spotter ? Expert typoholic looking at an arbit Typeface in an exotic image ? Here’s some good news to cater to your interest. We’ve added a custom text preview option for you to preview Typefaces with your custom text to confirm tags yourself first hand.

And as usual, keep the suggestions pouring so that we can customize the app to give you and the typoholics out there the best app experience possible.

H-app-enings

And here comes the next milestone, 5000+ users aboard. Impressive ain’t it ? Of course we found another impressive happening in the ecosystem. We are getting to see some wonderful reactions, both brickbats and bouquets that are helping us provide you the app experience that you as the end user prefer it to be. Some serious bug fixes, feature additions all thanks to such interactions and more importantly, Typeface spotting and some new ideas on foundries/Typefaces. Stay tuned for more h-app-ening updates.

Q:hi fontli-crew. i just wanted to ask which channel is the best to send feedback to the app and experience? love using fontli so far! best, etienne

etiennepacifico

Hi etienne,

Thank you so much! We would love to hear from you. The quickest way to hear from us shooting a mail to info@fontli.com

So waiting for your mail there:)

And that’s 2000 wonderful typophiles (or 2050 if we throw in a little more precision) showing their type love with Fontli. With close to 2000 images of font faces shared, quite some way the app has come in terms of user involvement and app improvement. Of course, there’s a long road ahead of us on both fronts.

While we work on the app itself thanks to your suggestions, please get engaged by tagging and sharing more awesome typefaces. As a peek into what’s cooking in the ecosystem, here are some recent shares from our popular users on board.