Silk 2.1.3 review

Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 3171K Developer: UnSanity Buy Now Price: $10.00 Updated: 14 Jul 2006

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Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 in all Carbon applications.

Powerful font substitution options accessible from the preference pane.

This means antialiased text in Netscape, Mozilla, and many others. Why wait for developers to update their Carbon applications when you can get the silky smooth text everywhere, right now?

Moreover, it can substitute one font with another in your applications, change the theme font (the font used to display menus, window titles, and other interface elements).

Here are some key features of "Silk":
Substitutes fonts in the applications.
Changes the default theme font to any other font.
Enforces the minimum font size setting.
Enables the Quartz text rendering in all running Carbon applications, such as Netscape, Mozilla and many others.
Exclude list feature allows you to exclude certain applications so they work as before, if the antialiased text there looks bad.
Convenient drop button in the Silk preference pane to quickly detect if a particular application is Carbon or not.
Implemented as an easy-to-use preference pane.

Limitations:
Will function for only 15 days after installation.

What's New:
Silk is now a Universal (Fat) binary compatible with the new Intel-based Macs (ICBMs).
Addresses a display problem with synthetic font styles in a future version of WebKit if font substitution is enabled.
Fixes the minimum font size settings in applications that use WebKit.
Addressed a potential problem with the font in the location field in Safari.
Fixes a potential over release of memory if font substitution was enabled but no fonts were set to be substituted.
Added an Updater that automatically checks for updates at user-specified intervals.
No longer have to relaunch System Preferences after entering your registration information in order to see it.
Greatly reduces the dependence on font families. Silk no longer substitutes fonts based on the stored Font Family ID. This means substitution and changing the theme font should continue to work even if you have duplicate fonts with the same name but different Font Family IDs.
If the specified theme font is no longer available, Silk no longer replaces the theme font with Geneva (or some other random font).