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Sunday was our 30th wedding anniversary, and I wanted something more personal and unique in a card for my wife than is available off-the-shelf.
I have made greeting cards from scratch using word processors and paint/draw graphics applications over the years, but I had never used purpose-made greeting card software before.
easy card creator was a quick download, and after a brief scan of the readme document, I figured I was good to go. My idea was to use some photos of us taken around the time of our wedding in Bermuda (where my life was born and raised) in 1974, combined with some appropriate text commemorating our three decades together.
One potential pitfall of using programs like easy card creator is that with so many creative choices and options available, one can very easily overdo things. I resolved to keep it fairly simple, using three separate photographs on the first and interfacing pages respectively, and just one font and font color, which after some experimentation turned out to be Bickley Script LET and basic black, after trying aquamarine blue text superimposed over a background photo, but finding it didn't have quite enough readability, at least at the contrast level afforded by my pedestrian (but reliable) Lexmark Z-35 inkjet printer.
On the other hand, in this particular instance I rather liked the artfully subtle pastel effect on the photos that the Z-35 rendered. Sometimes you actually can make a virtue of necessity, but if you intend on making a lot of greeting cards I would recommend a more capable printer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
A Cocoa drawer in the startup window contains reminders of upcoming holidays and special days. This easy card events system can notify you of upcoming events, you can add your own events to this system. On Mac OS X easy card can obtain peoples' Birthdays if they have been entered.
The first order of business, after starting up easy card creator, was to decide on a card layout. I went for the classic double-fold option, but easy card creator supports the single fold format as well, and email greeting cards too.
Once you settle on a format choice, you can get to work deciding what style of background to use, ranging from plain white to a variety of color options. I chose a left-to- right gradient in a pale aquamarine blue for the inner third page.
You can import photos and artwork using an Open dialog, and select from various size and tiling configurations. easy card creator embeds the images that are used on a card into the card file, and can import Adobe Photoshop files, TIFFs, GIFs, JPEGs and PICTs. Your font selection and point size, text color, and text placement are determined using easy card creator's tool dialogs, with your changes and additions displayed in real time in the main easy card creator window when you click be Apply button. The usual basic text controls, such as Bold, Italic, Underscore, and so forth are available in a button bar. There is also a Captionize option, and text effects such as a 3D caption object, Photoshop quality drop shadow & outline, and engraving.
I found easy card creator to be a bit sluggish in response on my 700 Hz G3 iBook, but it wasn't a big deal, and I expect that with a faster G4 or G5 machine that issue would disappear altogether.
I would also prefer that one could enter text in an object box and then format and drop it in precisely the desired location, rather than having to pick from easy card creator's list of text placement locations. You can, however, rotate text. I worked around using the "center center" placement and using Returns.
Those niggles aside, I really enjoy using easy card creator, and did, in fact, succeed in creating a very satisfactory card on my first try. Here is the page quadrant as it emerged from the printer:
And here's the card after being carefully folded:
easy card creator will print to standard plain or photo-grade 8 1/2 x 11 paper, and also supports custom Red River single-fold paper sizes. I used Kodak Picture Paper 7mil, which seemed to strike a good balance between foldability and a quality feel.
easy card creator can also output to email as noted, and can print out custom envelopes (the user has to do some hard copy cutting, folding, and pasting) for double-fold style cards only.
The program is compatible with Apple iPhoto and Address Book (Address Book support requires OS 10.2 or better).
This is an excellent little application that even relative computer neophytes should be able to get up to speed using with little difficulty, but it is still powerful enough to satisfy more advanced users. Easy Card Creator works like other vector based image editing software such as AppleWorks or Illustrator. If you know how to drag & drop, you can create a greeting card. Just drag out the object you want from the palette on the left drop it onto the page, the rest is controlled from the properties palette. Templates for cards can also be created to assist others to make cards even faster. You you can also choose from selected templates available from Script Software's growing library of templates, and also choose from a selection of pre-written messages.
If you send more than a handful of greeting cards a year, easy card creator should quickly repay its modest 20 dollar registration fee, and you can't put a price on its facilitation of personalized greetings.
System Requirements
Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.2.3 or higher
800x600 Display
Macintosh compatible printer (for printing)
Internet connection & e-mail account (for sending e-mails)
A Windows version is also available.
New in Version 2.3.0:
- [add] Add an apply button to the text editor.
- [add] Add Import mail and imported mail setting.
- [add] Added Red River Paper sizes.
- [add] Allow the use of envelopes when using other paper size and single fold.
- [add] iPhoto Library Browser (Mac OS X only)
- [add] My Pictures Browser
- [add] New e-mail storage mechanism
- [add] New Window Handler (Mac OS X only)
- [add] Option to Use Apple Mail (Mac OS X only)
- [add] Option to use AOL
- [add] Picture Patrol Downloads Browser
- [add] Sub categories for the download interfaces.
- [bug] Fixed a bug when a new card is created it is flagged as dirty.
- [bug] Front Window, display no longer disappears when window is moved. (Windows only)
- [bug] Has a problem with previous e-mail settings when they haven't changed. (Possibly a encoding issue)
- [mod] Amalgamated the Page Setup, Fold Options and Card Info into one 'Card Setup'.
- [mod] Update Window, Improved the time taken to establish a faulty connection.
- [mod] Update Window, improved the error handling.
- [add] Improve the speed of the browsers.
- [bug] FIxed crash on launch (Mac OS X only)
- [mod] Improved the speed of the HTML generation of the e-mails.
- [mod] Quicker at opening a card. Alleviated duplication.
- [add] Ability for custom paper sizes.
easy card creator is $20 demoware
For more information, visit:
http://www.scriptsoftware.com
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď MooresViews ď
