The Online Universe

If you are like a lot of people that like to do graphics you probably have found yourself downloading an enormous amount of fonts and Dingbats { fonts that are actually images or pictures} to use. The problem is one day you will see they are out of control and slowing your computer.

According to Microsoft you can have about a 1000 fonts installed but anything over 300 really slows down your computer, not to mention the large graphics stored in pictures or animations. If you do not have a file system set up for font an picture management, you need to set one up.

Create a folder for each type of picture for example you can make one for all those pretty tiles for backgrounds. I separate them by large and small and the strips of gradient color each in a folder.

Corner

Corners, bars, supplies which are actually small elements or scraps and I have organized {well, not so well] by type like Vintage, Oriental, Holidays {you get the picture}. I also like to have my uninstalled Fonts in my picture files to plan a project as well.  Then when I need something I just go to where I have them stored and pich out what I need easily to open or view.  I like to have as much of my materials on my external Flash Drive as my computer is older and even with upgraded Hard Drive and Memory uses a lot of CPU’s. By the way defraging your computer regularly will help the speed.

What I recently found was I didn’t use many of the install fonts in my windows files very often and I never could find the perfect font I was searching for with all my fonts in my folders. Each time I had to open the view fonts with windows thingy and then I forgot which font was which font after looking at several candidates.

Somewhere a long time ago I remebered I downloaded a font explorer, but of course never installed it. I looked in my free program downloads folder and low and behold there it was waiting for me. Before I installed it I went again to the site and found there was another program that really went hand in hand with the font explorer so I downloaded it as well and installed them both.

Wow, I thought how cool is this. All the wasted time and frustration { usually late at night, that’s when I do my best work} could have been avoided.

The software I’m talking about is Font Explorer and Shell Tools. It’s free and it is great! You can get it here:

http://www.moonsoftware.com or

http://www.softpedia.com/developer/Moon-Software-1216.html

This is what the author posted on his site About:

http://www.moonsoftware.com/about.asp

Moon Software was founded in 1996 by me, Ahto Tanner, and is still basically a single-guy company. I’m located in Estonia (Europe). I hope you don’t mind that elsewhere on this site I often say “we” (as a company) and not “I”.

I’m not going to bait you with long made up “success story” of “our company” and why “we are the best” here. I just hope that when using my software you feel the attention to detail that I have put into my programs, and that is why you like it. Also, I must confess that I feel a bit guilty that I don’t update my software as frequently as some of you would like, however, I can promise that every new major release is at the next level in functionality and detail.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you can always use any of my programs without hesitation, that it will somehow “break” your computer. 🙂

After I Googled Ahto,  I found he is a very talented guy his pictures are shown here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebaseonu/ and  http://www.flickr.com/people/rebaseonu/

It’s really nice to know there are people out there freely giving of themselves. Just when you think the world has gone to Hell in a Hand Basket a life saver comes along and  I thought it was nice that he said not to worry about breaking your computer.

The only problem I found is when you pull up the moonsoftware.com  site,  sometimes there are problems connecting. I think it is because it is Europe and the links are not so strong or they could be old. As far as the software it is really wonderful and what a time saver. I haven’t tried to email yet but the developer and author can be reached :  ahto@moonsoftware.com