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Provides: Family printing activities
Developer: Nova Development
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.2 or greater, PowerPC G3 or greater, DVD drive (product available free on CD via exchange), 512MB RAM or greater, about 2GB of HD space. Universal application.
Retail Price: $49.95

Designed for individuals who want to be creative and/or for families who want a variety of rainy-day projects, Print Explosion Deluxe 3 also provides options for the enterprising small business owner who wants to create his/her own print items. From crafts to business cards, from holiday greetings to letterheads, Print Explosion Deluxe is a successful single-station program to keep your printer busy.

It's fun to see an application's upgrade and see that things that you've talked about have been implemented. That's the case with one of the biggest problems with the previous version of Print Explosion Deluxe—in the previous version it was almost impossible to see the sample images of what you were selecting. Now, assisted by an improved interface, it's also easier to see what you are looking at with (up to) full sized images.

I reviewed Print Explosion Deluxe 2 some time ago, and my biggest complaint was that the previews for each item were so small as to be worthless. Now, with a significantly improved interface, it is not only easy to scroll through all of the potential projects that PE has to offer, but there are not problems seeing what the item will look like before you start.

Installation is a bit different from the previous version. In version 2, you installed the application and a small collection of sample graphics, layouts and quotes. All together, you placed about 400MB of data on your computer. In addition, the CDs that held the program and a lot of other data files were kept off your computer and remained on the CDs for future access. The good thing about this is that it didn't fill up your hard drive with material that you may or may not want. The bad news is that if you wanted to access any of the other supplied material, you had to remember to grab the extra CD and deal with the slow speeds required of CD access.

With PE Deluxe 3, a single container (not a formal folder) installs 1.73GB of data. While this means that everything is available for easy access, it also means that your hard drive is now filled with materials you may not really need. Unfortunately the installer provides no options on how PE Deluxe is installed nor what can be left off of a custom instillation. In fact, there are no custom instillations.

When you start up PE Deluxe, you get the entry window with three options:, you can either select "Choose a Template," to use a pre-made item (that you can customize till the cows come home), or "Design from Scratch" to choose a blank template (which I find a bit more difficult), or to "View Tutorials" (which utilizes Apple's Help Viewer).

The tutorials are very straightforward and will be helpful to those who are not the best of hackers on programs. If your computer skills are pretty strong and you are a good guesser when hacking, you probably won't need to look at them. On the other hand, if you want to see the guidelines for (1) Customizing a Greeting Card, (2) Making Scrapbook Pages, (3) Creating a CD/DVD Label, or (4) Personalizing T-shirts, go for it—it never hurts to look at the manual. On the other hand, the very last item on the Tutorial page is "Tips and Shortcuts." This has valuable guides on how to control movement by 1 or 5 pixels, or rotations by 1 or 5 degrees, etc. This is good information.

Just as it's easier to fine tune a written work from something that's already started, I find it much easier to work from a pre-made template even if by the time I finish there's nothing left of the original. PE Deluxe provides an incredible number of pre-made cards, certificates, banners, invitations, etc. for you to work with. I found the vast majority of them no better (or worse) than what I pass up in the drugstore when I'm looking for a card. What I am looking for are color ideas, design elements, shapes, whatever that gets my creative juices flowing. Because of the incredible amount of customization you can do with PE Deluxe, the thought of using a card "as is" seems rather, well, empty. Between this program and Photoshop I can do some pretty slick cards.

Anyhow, from the startup screen (shown above) you chose if you want to start from scratch or use a template. If you open one and find that you do not want to use it after all, when you click the close box on your selection, you are now staring at an empty screen. You can now either select New from the File menu (or Command-n) which brings up the startup window. From the File menu you can also select "Choose a Template..." or "Design from Scratch..." It would have been great if there were keyboard commands for these two items so you could access these without having to go for the mouse.

As seen below, if you are starting from a template, all of the basic options, sub-options, and final images are there to be selected from. Another significant improvement is that now Nova is using Apple's Quartz engine for image creation. This means that everything is easier to see, cleaner to look at, and good looking at all resolutions.

There are more options of things to do/make that include the T-shirt printing options and Scrapbook options. Some of the items are kind of silly, such as the fax pages—they all use colors. Why have a fax page with colors? Are there any fax machines that do color? I've not seen them. Also, items like the paper airplanes (shown above) are both cool and a major lost opportunity: while all of the crafts items are nifty, they do not provide for any significant opportunities for those rainy days. That is, why not have image outlines for your kids to color in by crayon or water colors? While many of these provide a bonanza for ink jet ink sales, they do not provide the structured freedom that many kids (and parents) need.

In the previous version of PE Deluxe, the largest thumbnail image was smaller than what you see above and the image quality was very poor. Now, if you drag the slider seen on the bottom right to the right, each sample thumbnail increases in size to fill the allotted space. If you increase the size of this window (by dragging the lower right size handle), the size of the sample image will increase in size as well. The only limitations to the size of the thumbnail is the size of your screen.

Once you have determined what you want to work with, either double-click the thumbnail or click on the thumbnail and then the Finish button the item will open to full size. Below is an example of a card with a side drawer that you can click on to display each of the four pages independently. [Note: What you can't seem to do is to show the full inside spread to create a message across pages 2-3.]

There are thousands of templates from which to choose, and each one can be customized. There are over 100,000 graphics to work with and you can also import either GIF or JPEG images either self-created or from any collection you have on your computer. In addition, there are also over 900 fonts supplied with PE Deluxe.

Once you get past the item selection, there is not that much difference between the previous version of PE Deluxe and this one. You cannot work on text directly in a project, you double-click any text or click onto the project with a text tool and the text palette pops up. You compose whatever you want in this palette as well as customize how it will look. As seen below, if you double-click on prepared text, you can select from a variety of prepared text styles and then customize the result or create your own. If you create any that are particularly nice, you can same them for future cards. Once you are finished and okay what you've done, you can change the size of the text box containing your text, and, as you change the size of the box, the text changes size to accommodate. You can rotate the text box as well as tilt the box as a trapezoid. What you see below is the original text from some card (in the box with the handles). Over the text is the Customize window with some alterations that haven't been committed because I hadn't tapped the [OK] button.

You can add shapes and color to your heart's content, as well as more pre-made shapes than you'll want to even look at.

One of the few poor UI aspects about PE Deluxe is the toolbar across the top of the window. As seen below, it's just a simple strip that lets you add text, graphics, shapes, etc. What it doesn't do is provide any feedback that you've clicked on anything. That is, if you click on the Text icon, it doesn't darken, lighten, or change color to let you know you've successfully clicked on anything. Likewise, with any of these, after you click on the icon, you then have to click in the screen for anything to happen. Once you've done it, you know what will happen, but until that time you are kind of lost.

Printing from PE Deluxe remains excellent. If you are printing a card that has an image on both sides, the process is very easy. You place one in your printer and start the print process. When you press print, the below dialog pops up. After one side has printed, you take the printed item out of the "out" section of your printer and place it in the "in" portion of your printer with the empty side ready, then click on the "Print Second Page" button. You are done. [NOte: You might consider going to your local business store and pick up a box of greeting card stock. They come with envelopes and are not all that expensive as they come in generic and name brand packages.]

Besides the poor icon feedback mentioned above, there are a few other minor complaints I have with PE Deluxe. There are two kinds of cards you can print, one that uses card stock as I just mentioned and those that print on standard paper. The former will be folded in half while the latter are folded in quarters. You cannot fully verify this unless you click on the Print Preview button. The single-fold is seen directly below while the quarter-fold is shown below that.

Admittedly, there is a slightly different aspect ratio in the two card types, but until you learn to recognize them, you are very likely to create your masterpiece card only to find out that the paper you have prepared in your printer is the wrong one. I strongly feel that these two card types should either be properly identified by their name and/or separated by type in the card listings. The curious thing is that the card blanks do provide this information while the prepared cards provide no information of any kind as to what kind of card you are working with.

In short, this is a fun program. If you have the previous version, there are not all that many features I can think of that are very compelling beyond the significantly easier access to the designs. However, at $50 (no upgrade discount), it is definitely something to consider. My biggest complaint is that too many of the "fun" projects that involve kids provide essentially no opportunity for extra creative opportunities. Yes, this is Print Explosion Deluxe, but that doesn't mean that it can't print out pages for kids to color in later by hand. Options such as this would have been greatly appreciated.

Beyond that, some of the items are silly; such as colored fax sheets.

I guess what I like most about PE Deluxe is how variable it can be and how much you can do with any of the designs. On the other hand, I found too many of the designs...how do I say this...insipid. But that's me, I know others may like them because I see card designs like this at the drug store, and I know someone is buying them. If it were possible to not have to install all of the card designs, it would have not done such a hit on my computer's hard drive. In the grand scheme of things, these complaints have very little to do with the program itself. Enjoy.

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___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.