Sophie’s Cards 6 Greeting Card Maker App For OS X – ‘Book Mystique Review

I love greeting card creation apps. for at least three reasons. First, they save a bunch of money. Store-bought greeting cards are absurdly expensive. Second, they save time (which is more money), at least once using the program becomes intuitive. No more schlepping to the store and searching through whatever inventory is on hand. Third, you can create just the right card tailor-made for the recipient and with the exact sentiment you wish to convey.

For the past several years, my favourite greeting card app has been Sophie’s Cards, an interesting application based on Apple’s subsidiary Filemaker technology. It had its angularities, but overall I’ve found it to be the most satisfying card app among the many I’ve sampled. And it’s just gotten a while lot better.

The just-released Sophie’s Cards Version 6 has been completely re-mastered, with an easier to use, tab-based interface, that has been reduced to two unified modules — one for Design and one for Saved Cards. All in all, there are more than 20 new features and hundreds of minor changes according to the developer, making this the most radical makeover Sophie’s Cards has had yet.

There’s now direct address import from the Apple Address Book, and the addition of support for business cards and gift cards, which the program didn’t previously support, including to the ability to build individual content cards that can later be printed on an entire sheet.

A major interface improvement is that you can now directly enter, edit and format text right on the card preview, rather than having to switch to another interface module as was necessary in previous versions. Also, any font installed on your computer under your user name is now available for formatting a card.

Sophie’s Cards 6 now presents in a resizable window that can cover your desktop, allowing more content to be viewed on machines with larger displays. Great if you like full-screen mode. I don’t personally, so am happy that it’s optional with Sophie’s Cards.

There’s a newly expanded Preferences section, that is now available from any Design screen of Sophie’s Cards, that gives you more control of Program options. You also now have the option of deleting any stored any text or image in the program’s libraries, including default Sophie’s Cards text and images that you would never choose to use.

Another new feature is that you can now choose from a collection of borders or small graphic embellishments to use on the inside and/or outside of cards – a nice enhancement. You can also now email cards in addition to or instead of printing them, and emailed cards also offer page colors and textures not available in printed cards.

Sophie’s Cards 6 produces cleaner-looking cards, with version numbers and other unnecessary elements no longer appear on the back of cards, and the Sophie’s Cards logo can now be replaced with your own logo or text, or you can now entirely remove the picture thumbnail, picture title and quotation references from the back of cards, although personally, I’m partial to that stuff, and think it makes the cards look more professional.

There’s also a new library feature that provides the ability to build your own “card store” by instantly saving cards you’ve created and choose to keep so that you can re-use them later, or quickly modify them as you wish. The “card store” is fully searchable, with text or images able to be found instantly by typing into a search bar, or you can still use occasion lists or picture type lists. Selection and formatting changes now appear instantly on the same screen.

The program’s photo library has been expanded with new content. The photos are uncredited, but the photographer or photographers are true artists, and the images 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.

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, but if not you can also easily import your own images and add them to the libraries. 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, providing plenty of attractive and tasteful choices that can be mixed and matched using the card format pane, which is arranged in four columns representing the front, left inner, right inner, and back panels of the card.

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.

The program’s Help guide has been rewritten, is now graphically based, and includes a new context sensitive help guide. There’s also a new introductory movie and context sensitive help. You can access the movie and context sensitive help from the Help Menu pulldown, or just press the “F1” key.

The developers claim “dramatic speed improvements” for Sophie’s Cards 6. I don’t know about “dramatic.” The program does seem somewhat livelier and more responsive, but speed and interface responsiveness are still not among its stronger points, and startup is still painfully slow, at least on my 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 4 GB of RAM. I expect things proceed quicker on the latest Core “i”: powered Macs.

Sophies Cards 6 is a big, somewhat ponderous program — a consequence of its FileMaker underpinnings. The compressed file is a nearly 600 MB download, that took an hour and a half for me over broadband. The upside is that FileMaker technology give it a robust foundation, and it’s always been very stable in my experience. Sophie’s Cards FileMaker roots are also evidenced in its functional and not unattractive interface design , although it doesn’t closely follow Mac OS X appearance conventions. It looks sort of like a Mac program, but not quite.

Cut/Copy/Paste still doesn’t work with keyboard shortcuts in the edit menu nor in the live preview window and neither does Command-Z for undo. Scrolling in the Photos and Verse library menus window is not as sluggish as it used to be, but still falls well short of “right now” responsiveness, and the category pull-down menus in the Photos and Verse selection columns are maddeningly slow to respond. However, you can now type text directly into the card preview and format text using the Format menu rather than using the pull-down menus. Using the thumb in the scrollbar still doesn’t give you a live response, which can be tedious. Happily, mouse scroll wheels work in Sophie’s Cards content selection columns, and I find that the most satisfactory method in most instances

When you find 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. I’m delighted to report that when the selection kicks in, you are no longer zoomed back to the top of the column as used to be the case.

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 and thumbnail of the cover image on the back..

The program will print to standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper, but of course will work best with proper card stock paper such as available from Avery or Epson, for which size configuration options are provided in the menus. Sophie’s Cards automatically saves changes as you make them, so there is no “Save” button for the program. You can archive and keep track of cards that you’ve created with the Save Card feature, and make selections from your saved card archives in two different views that are toggled from toolbar icons.

You can specify landscape or portrait oriented cards with full or small photos, and with or without cover text, and there are a variety of other personalization formatting options. This formatting flexibility has always been one of Sophie’s Cards’ biggest advantages.

Sophie’s Cards will print to “Preview” or Portable Document File (.pdf) to see what a card will look like before printing the final. The Program contains printing options that allow you to print more than one copy of a given side at a time (i.e., Batch Printing).

Cards created by Sophie’s Cards are very 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 (now optional) Sophie’s Cards logo.

If you’re 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.

System Requirements:
• Power PC G5 or faster with at least 256MB of RAM
or
• Intel based Mac with at least 512MB of RAM
• Mac OS X v10.5 or later; Note: Sophie’s Cards has not yet been tested with OS X 10.7 Lion
• 1 GB of available hard disk drive space
• A photo quality inkjet printer
• CD-ROM drive for CD versions of Sophie’s Cards.
• For printing, you need either U.S. or International paper, including envelopes, in note card, half-fold, or postcard sizes, or U.S. Letter or A4 sheets for quarter-fold cards or frameable art.

The downloadable version is a fully enabled demonstration copy that prints watermarks on the back of cards 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, instantly transforming the demo into a fully-registered application by buying and entering a registration key, so you don’t have to re-download it.

Sophie’s Cards 6.0 sells for $39.95.

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