Business Card Composer 4.0 review
DownloadBusiness Card Composer - create and print business or personal cards with this native Mac OS X app.
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Business Card Composer - create and print business or personal cards with this native Mac OS X app. Prepared design and image collections make it easy to create your own cards.
Brand-new Mac technologies expand users' capabilities when working with graphics and text (opacity, masks, color graded fills and more). Full integration with the OS X system functionality enables using personal information for cards from the Apple Address Book.
Business Card Composer allows to print out cards on specific paper stock from world-wide manufacturers, or custom paper.
Here are some key features of "Business Card Composer":
Graphics
More than 23. clipart images (700 - in download edition).
More than 500 ready-made designs, organized in categories (400 - in download edition).
More than 100 unique masks.
Design Business Cards
Create regular, folded, CD-R cards.
Horizontal and vertical layouts supported.
Smart guides help to arrange design elements neatly.
3 alignment modes, among them text alignment as to the text borders.
The application supports object editing on Background and Foreground layers, which helps to create advanced card designs.
Special text labels for marking phone number, e-mail, etc.
Working with Graphics
Control transparency, tint images with colors, tile and rotate them.
Insert images in many supported formats - TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PDF, EPS and more.
7. photo objects with transparent background can be applied to any picture to create mixed designs.
Search images by keywords.
Image cropping allows you to crop images to remove the parts you don't like directly in Composer.
A custom image can be used as a mask as well as predesigned masks.
Technologies
Integration with Apple Address Book - drag and drop contacts right onto your cards.
Integration with iPhoto lets preview and use pictures from the iPhoto libraries.
Search images in Google - right from Business Card Composer!
Images from a custom folder can be used along with the built-in clipart.
Generate fancy random backgrounds with a click of the button.
Order your cards to be printed and mailed to you from an online print shop.
Counter feature allows you to numerate cards, assign each card a unique number.
Text File Data support allows to read the data from text files. This can be helpful for creating badges for a conference, etc.
Usability
3-step Assistant to get started quickly.
About 700 supported business card paper for ink jet and laser printers, from Avery, APLI, Decadry, Sigel, A-One and other manufacturers.
Use custom layouts for unsupported card stock, greeting cards, badges and other kinds of labels.
Customizable export to PDF and TIFF allows to save your design in a format, appropriate for sending to a professional print shop.
Use export to JPEG format for sending business card via e-mail.
Print Cards
Printer calibration allows to fine-tune the printer for accurate results.
Cut marks can be printed - helpful for printing on non-perforated paper.
Control the number of cards you want to print and the position on the sheet from where to start printing.
New printing technology allows choosing among 3 printing methods. You can either print cards for yourself, or print one design for several people, or even print multiple designs on one sheet.
In the printing process, preview window with the additional settings displays your modifications on the fly.
Limitations:
Promotional text will be printed on each card untill you register.
What's New:
General:
100+ new card designs added.
Merge Image functionality allows to import and auto-replace images from Address Book, iPhoto and Finder. Can be used for creating badges and printing iPhoto thumbnails.
Interface:
Interface changes: new Clipart panel, Tabs with advanced editing options were added to the Inspector window.
New Zoom options (Fit Width, Fit Height, Fit Page).
Finish button on the first step of the Assistant allows to skip subsequent steps, also Open Recent File option was added.
Object Editing:
Adjustable shadows with color settings were added.
Option to set object position and size manually available from Geometry Tab of Inspector.
Horizontal and vertical object alignments were added.
Option to distribute objects vertically and horizontally, as well as adjustable vertical spacing were added (suitable for text distributing).
Pattern option can be applied to lines.
Text Editing:
New text editing features available through Inspector:
- change font size;
- control character, line and paragraph spacing.
Import:
iPhoto integration improved. iPhoto folders are supported, photos and titles can be imported.
Drop an image from Clipart Collection onto a selected image will replace it. New image will be cropped to fit available space.
"Set address field in a line" check allows to modify two-lined address from Address Book into one line automatically (available in the Preferences dialog).
Inserting objects from other BeLight applications becomes available.
Saving:
The structure of document storage was changed, now images are kept in their original format. Therefore, improved work with documents which contain large number of images.
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