1995 A few weeks ago I reviewed here a little greeting card creation program called HappyHolidays! 2.1, which sells for a modest $10.00 and works very well, but is limited to making photo or postcard-type cards.

Sophie's Cards, the subject of this review, can be considered the other end of the greeting card software spectrum in terms of power and features, selling for $39.95 and supporting a variety of half and quarter-fold formats and custom envelope creation as well as postcard-type cards, and including extensive libraries of 792 photographic images and 730 text greeting messages. Sophie's Cards also allows you to import your own photos or art images and compose your own text. Imported pictures should be about 8 x 10.5� and no more than 72 dpi.

However, you probably won't want to import photos at least, because one of Sophie's Cards' most impressive features is the incredible library of photographic images. They are uncredited, but the photographer or photographers are true artists, and the images are superb - more than a few of them arrestingly beautiful. The selection is eclectically varied in subject matter and mood, so you should have no problem finding just the right image for any occasion and recipient. The program's developers aren't kidding when they say you should never have to send the same card twice. The challenge is deciding among so many excellent alternatives.

I've been a fan of Sophie's Cards since I first reviewed Version 3.0 here a little over a year ago, and the program has had two full version number upgrades since then and is now at Version 5.4.4.4, and while it was very good already, improvements have been substantial.

The beauty of a program like Sophie's Cards is that making your own greeting cards with a computer and color printer can save you money if you send a lot of cards, and perhaps more importantly, allows you to create personalized cards with just the right image and sentiments expressed.

I have two very important occasions to remember in mid-July. My wife and I were married on her birthday back in 1974, so it would be a double-disaster to forget. This year, with Sophie's Cards, I was able to find a selection of images I knew she would like, and just the right sentiments to go with them (I'm a writer; not a poet ).

Sophie's Cards 4.0 was a substantial improvement over version 3.0. Version 5.0 is a much less dramatic improvement from version 4.0, but still a welcome enhancement.

The Sophie's Cards interface design is functional and not unattractive, although it doesn't closely follow Mac OS X appearance conventions. It looks sort of like a Mac program, but not quite. Sophie's Cards was developed in Filemaker Pro 6.0, a program with which I have no experience, and that may be where the appearance derives from.

The selection of Sophie's Cards card images provides plenty of attractive and tasteful choices that can be mixed and matched using the program's Choose pane, which is arranged in four columns representing the front, left inner, right inner, and back panels of the card. The photography is generally spectacular, with a wide selection of genre themes.

You should be able to find a suitable card image for any occasion in the library. Occasion types that may be selected include Anniversary, Announcement/Invitation, Apology, Birthday, Congratulations, Engagement, Farewell, Father's Day, Friendship, Get Well, Holiday, Just For Fun, Miss You, Mother's Day, Riddles For Kids, Sympathy, Thank You, and Valentine love.

Using Sophie's Cards is reasonably easy and intuitive. The basic steps are:

Select an Occasion (including holidays) and the program offers you a menu of appropriate images and verses. You can apply a particular color or style on just one or all words on a card or envelope. Text can be positioned with several options, superimposed over front cover photos, and on the inside faces and the back of the card in portrait or landscape format.

--OR--

Select a Sophie's Cards photo, and add your own text using My Words.

--OR--

You can import your own pictures to create a completely personalized card using My Words & Pictures.

The cards created by Sophie's Cards are very classy and professional-looking, complete with thumbnails and information about the front panel image on the back, along with attribution of the verse/text selections used, and a Sophie's Cards logo.

Cut/Copy/Paste still doesn't work with keyboard shortcuts or the edit menu. Scrolling in the Choose window is still slow, and selection response sluggish, although a lot better than with the previous version on both counts. Happily, mouse scroll wheels work in Sophie's Cards content selection columns, which is good, because sluggish, bulky response with the selection columns is one of my few negative criticisms of the program. In testing previous versions of Sophie's Cards, I've been inclined to give it a bit of a free pass for its sluggish performance on my 550 MHz G4 Pismo with 640 megabytes of RAM, since that machine is at the low end of the power spectrum these days (the developers cite a 500 MHz CPU as the minimum supported specification, they recommend at least a 1 GHz processor), but this time I was using a machine with more than double the Pismo's capacities in both categories, my 17-inch 1.33GHz PowerBook with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM, and Sophie's Cards is still slow to respond to input.

Dragging the scroll "thumbs" for the columns is the quickest method of review, although with the lengthy inventory of entries in each column, it's not very precise. I find that the scroll wheel is the most satisfactory method in most instances, but not very speedy.

When you find and a picture or text snippet that you fancy, the drill is to click on the button on the left side of the selection pane, which, after a time lag, becomes highlighted in blue to indicate that it's the active selection. Unfortunately, when the selection finally kicks in, you are zoomed back to the top of the column. Your desired choice remains selected, but it's still annoying behavior. Since it's explicitly mentioned in the user manual, I guess it's possible that it's intentional rather than a bug, but I can't imagine why.

I hasten to emphasize that the general goodness of this program and the superb results you can achieve with it make these aggravations well worth putting up with, and I've found that most, if not all, greeting card creation programs have their cranky idiosyncrasies, but I do hope Sophie's Cards' developers can find a way to speed up and enhance the responsiveness of the options selection interface. The the same sort of hesitant response obtains in the Format and Address windows pull-down menus.

Aside from those gripes, it's pretty much all good.

Those menus, incidentally, provide you with a comprehensive selection of options for formatting: fonts, font size, style and color, positioning your text greetings, card orientation (portrait or landscape), and card size.

Sophie's Cards includes 16 custom fonts. You can view the list of fonts that are shipped with Sophie's Cards by choosing Help from the Application Menu bar, then selecting “Fonts� from the pull down menu.

Included fonts are:
Macintosh Windows
AdineKirnberg-Script Adine
Aspire Aspire
BlackChancery Black
Christmas Christmas
Dobkin-Script Dobkin
Goodfish Goodfish
Handwriting Handwriting
Kennon Kennon
MarkerFeltThin Marker
Missive Missive
Provence Provence
SapirSans Sapir
SnyderSpeed Snyder
Steinbeck Steinbeck
Swenson Swenson
Uechi-Gothic Uechi

Not all fonts have all style capabilities. The font Helvetica must be in your computer's (i.e., root) font collection (i.e., not a user's font collection) for Sophie's Cards to function correctly. The program uses this font to render certain screens, but not to print cards. Helvetica is included in the MacOS, and was automatically installed on your machine when the MacOS was installed.

The Address pane facilitates custom addressing your card envelopes with both recipient and sender, and also provides for font, text alignment, and text color options. You can also choose an icon to place on the back of your envelope.

There is also a built-in spell checker.

There is a 48-page user manual included in PDF format, including about 15 pages of problem solving and troubleshooting tips and FAQs.

Sophie's Cards offers both international and U.S. paper sizes. You can refer directly to the card sizes by choosing “Paper Size� from the Help application pull down menu.

The better quality the paper, the higher quality results you will achieve. The developers recommend the use of quality gloss or vellum ink jet stock whenever possible. Specific sizes are available from Avery, Ilford, Quarto, Rössler, and others.

Sophie's Cards offers an option to print quarter-folds. Although you can use any 8 1/2 x 11 or A4 paper to print cards, the quality of the final card is almost solely dictated by the quality of the paper you use. 8 1/2 x 11 or A4 paper can also be purchased in very high quality, inkjet coated form, in matte, semi-gloss or gloss. You can also trim larger paper sizes to notecard sizes.

Sophie's Cards will automatically archive cards you have sent if the Card History option has been selected in the Preferences (it's turned off by default). You can add up to 150 Card History items. However, note well that if a significant number of Card History items are "My Words & Pictures" based, program performance may be impacted, and overall program size will grow.

New in version 5.0:
Featuring International Sizes A5 & A6, quarterfold, and Mac Intel compatibility. Plus new images, and additional new features.

System Requirements Mac:

Any Mac capable of running OS 10.3.9 or 10.4, including Intel Macs;
256 Mb of RAM;
Screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768 and millions of colors.
Approx. 1 Gigabyte of available hard disk space.
You must have Quicktime version 6, or higher, installed on your computer to view images in Sophie's Cards.

If you are looking for a greeting card creation program for the Mac, you really should check Sophie's Cards out. Notwithstanding my criticisms, this is a very cool card creation application, and its content database puts it in a class by itself, and capable of making very classy-looking greeting cards.

The downloadable version is a fully enabled demonstration copy that prints watermarks on the back of cards, and front and back of envelopes until it is registered. The program terminates after 14 days if it is not registered. Registration eliminates the watermarks. You can register at any time before or after the expiration to fully enable the Program.

Sophie's Cards 4.0 sells for US $39.95, a reduction from the previous price of $44.95.

For more information, visit:
http://sophiescards.com

Sophie's Cards is also listed on CNet, Softpedia and Apple Products Guide.


Charles W. Moore

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