Alaskan Apple Users Group Blog

by Gary Miller, AAUG Member

Conflict of interest disclosure: BeLight Software provided a free copy of Printfolio 1.6 to me for the purposes of the review.

Want to have it all? Then surely you’ll find buying BeLight Software’s Printfolio version 1.6 a great buy, for it includes 5 of their well crafted products: Business Card Composer ( which I reviewed last month on this site enthusiastically), Swift Publisher, Disc Cover, Labels and Addresses, and Tricks Pro plus a bonus Art Text( not the fully stand alone version, but does work with the other apps in this bundle).

I like the idea of having a single product that’s designed to work together, like Microsoft’s Office or others, BeLight, a company that really supports the Mac platform with it’s helpful, and easier to use than many that are a Pro level, these are for the regular user, like me. And the price is right, only $89.95 for the standard version, or for an extra 10 bucks, you get many more templates and fonts that are useable in all of these apps, so that’s the version I’d recommend.

I started using Business Card Composer in it’s latest version, 5, when I wanted to make my wife some nice looking business cards with google maps for the back, and bar code too. I found so many different templates, organized by genre or products we sell, like floral or retail, and then it was easy to changed fonts, colors, modify designs. And since her business isn’t easy to find, I’ve been looking for a way to have a map on it, and BeLight added this feature in this version, and it’s so easy to add it on the reverse side, like I did.

Swift Publisher is a handy layout application, again made for the Mac, and it easily uses it’s well supplied templates. I made up flyers, letterheads( it imports from your address book), and a newsletter that looked good. Their idea of using a graphic artists created templates throughout PrintFolio is a stroke of helping us users out. So we start with a canvas already giving us ideas that we can work on. Sure helped me. And the included videos teach it’s secrets quickly. In fact, all of these included apps have video tutorials on the BeLight site; I wish more companies would follow their lead in teaching about products, so you don’t have to then buy a book to learn it. And the help file is good too.

Disc Cover is a helpful program that’s included to assist in making CD/DVD art, it integrates with iTunes, so it got my data from an album, and it left it up to me how I wanted it to look. I wanted to make it a bit more advanced, and it works with the bonus component of Art Text, to tweak the art. It comes with 130 templates, more than enough. That leads me to the next product…

Labels and Addresses is one I use all the time for my envelopes, but it also postcards, address labels. I wanted to include bar codes to speed the post office along, and it did it without a hitch. What I like is the included video tutorials for specific tasks, like the bar code feature. They are easy to understand and follow along, stopping while I would try it.

Image Tricks is one I didn’t use much so far, but it does offer a future for me when I want to manipulate images. Because it’s integrated into Printfolio, it has more control that Mac’s iPhoto, but works well from what I did. I can see if you want to make a specific art approach. And lastly, is Art Text, which is included as a bonus, a plug in for Printfolio. If you want the stand alone version, it’s extra, but for me, it worked fine with the other components of this inclusive product. I liked the way I could make text come alive, it also is good at logos, web site buttons. I think it worked well.

The graphics capability of this application, is amazing, over 1070 templates, from simple to fancy, and it has over 24,000 clip art images and since I got the Retail version for only $ 10 more, it had 100 additional fonts. Worth it to me. It’s designed to work with the major manufacturers, like Avery, Memorex, Neato, etc, but I found even some of the more obscure stuff worked fine. Great.

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.11 and it’s Snow Leopard ready( Mac OS 10.6) which is what I have installed, no issues at all.