Business Card Composer - Applelinks: Review

As its name suggests, BeLight Software’s Business Card Composer is an application for creating your own business cards rather than farming the job out to a printer. It’s a Mac OS X native application allows you to choose from over 500 included card themes, or you can import your own artwork or photos to create truly customized business cards.

With Business Card Composer you can make:
- business cards
- original personal or calling cards
- fan club cards
- let your imagination flow freely

The earliest forms of visiting cards were playing cards. Visitors wrote on the cards their signatures, promissory notes and other messages. The first visiting cards appeared in France during the reign of Louis XIV - “Le Roi Soleil”. At the beginning of the 17th century, when there was no formal street numbering system in England, trade cards (visiting cards’ predecessors) were widely used as maps, directing the public to merchant’s stores.

In 19th Century America, it was considered to be in poor taste to use a business card when making a social call. A business card, left with the servants, could imply that you had called to collect a bill. Calling etiquette of the day was a somewhat ritualized version of the old custom of “visiting”. There were certain fixed rules laid down by society. Some are still observed in polite society, for example making signs on the card. The initial letters you can meet on personal cards stand for the French words: - p. f. - congratulations (pour féliciter) - p. r. - expressing one’s thanks (pour remercier) - even if one is presented with flowers - p. c. - mourning expression (pour condoléance) - p. p. c. - meaning to take leave (pour prendre congé) - p. p. - if you want to be introduced to anybody, send your visiting card (pour présenter)

You can find out more about business/calling card history at this Website:
http://www.belightsoft.com/products/composer/history.php

Business Card Composer is a do-it-yourself program. You can sit for a few minutes and quickly create a new card, or sit for a few hours and play with all of the bells and whistles.

You can specify characteristics like fonts, font sizes, colors and border styles. Business Card Composer is an object-oriented program, so you can easily select, move,experiment with and modify individual elements and lines of text in your card design.

I found Business Card Composer to be slick, intuitive, easy, and fun to use. It is a Macintosh-oriented application, and one of the theme sets features exclusively Macintosh images, indeed, I was as I was delighted to note, images of both of my current production computers, a 700 MHz iBook and a Pismo PowerBook.

There is also a wide selection of card backgrounds:

With business card composer you can go as simple and austere or as fancy and ornate as you like. I prefer a clean, understated look, and here are a couple of samples of what I was able to put together with a few minutes’ work using Business Card Composer.

Business Card Composer offers you a simple three-step process for making professional-quality business cards.

Step 1: Choose your design.
Choose one of the multiple designs included with Business Card Composer. There are both card backgrounds and pictures in the image libraries, which appear as thumbnails in a column on the left side of the composition window. You can insert personal information from the Apple Address Book into each design. Card sizes and properties can be specified in this dialog:

Step 2: Customize your design.
Now you can use Business Card Composer’s array of tools, such as masked and transparent objects and backgrounds, random background generators, borders, and color choices the dress up and customize you card design.

Step 3: Print your new business cards.
Once you are satisfied with the card design you’ve created, you can print out your business cards with any laser or inkjet printer. Specific business card stock is supported by the software.

Business Card Composer is primarily targeted at small and medium sized businesses and home users. It provides a complete package, with end-to-end capabilities from design to print out. The program is tailored for these particular consumer needs and is distinct in function and design from professional graphical packages. The package supports all available layouts from popular business card paper manufacturers (Apli, Avery, Canson, Herma, Sigel, etc.). Consequently, users don’t need to customize the cards’ positioning manually.

Full integration with OS X system functionality lets Business Card Composer incorporate data from Apple Address Book for the cards.

Ready-to-use sets for your work:
• Over 100 business card designs.
• Over 500 ready images, sorted into categories and available for preview.
• Built-in image search by key words.
• Some 50 assorted masks for images.

Appearance Tweaks:
• Color graded fills and mask options allow precise image effects for each card.
• You can specify any object’s opacity.
• Background images are supported.
• Built-in automatic background generator adds consistent style to your card.

Print Features:
• Print out your business cards on specific business card stock from manufacturers including Apli, Avery, Canson, Herma, Neato, Sigel, etc.
• Ability to select which cards on the page are printed.
• Printer calibration procedure.
• User defined page layouts.
• Print crop and registration marks for convenient card separation.

Ease Of Use:
• Apple Address Book integration.
• Smart Assistant will guide you through the process to professional-looking results.
• Enter your personal information for business cards only once. It can be automatically inserted into each design thereafter.
• All text objects have additional fields for accepted prefixes for telephone numbers, email addresses, etc.

Technology:
• Written in Cocoa.
• Support for PDF and the most popular graphic formats.
• Snap tool for aligning objects.
• Floating palettes display the selected object’s information and allow for more complex editing.

Obviously, I liked Buiness Card Composer. It strikes what I think is an ideal balance between capability and featuritis. The program is simple and intuitive enough that users with no experience in graphic arts should be able to produce top drawer results without the necessity of climbing a steep learning curve, but sufficiently powerful that completely professional-looking results can be attained.

Complaints? The documentation is not very extensive. I'm not a fan of the OS X Help motif, and that's what you get. I would prefer there to be at least a PDF manual that one could browse through without the hassle of starting up Help and opening ang closing various panes looking for the information you need. But as I said, the program is quite intuitive, so the thin documentation is not a fatal flaw.

In summary, this is a very cool little program.

System Requirements:
Mac OS X v.10.2 or higher

A free trial version may be downloaded from:
http://www.belightsoft.com/download/

The only restriction of the unlicensed software copy - additional information about the software developer is included into each printed card.

After purchasing the full version of Business Card Composer for $39,95 at:
http://www.belightsoft.com/composer/buy/ users can also get free technical support.

For more information, visit: http://www.belightsoft.com/composer/

Purchase: http://www.belightsoft.com/buy/

Download: http://www.belightsoft.com/download/

New in Business Card Composer 1.0.3

The latest Business Card Composer update is dedicated to enhancing the app’s stability and compatibility with printers. The 1.0.3 version features the following improvements:

Bugs fixed:
• Problems with print on some Canon BubbleJet printers (S200, S800, S900, etc.) fixed.
• Sudden quits of the application observed when object’s color and transparency are changed - corrected.
• Automated change of person when opening Change Person dialog is eliminated.
• Sometimes selection mark in background collection disappeared - corrected.
• A number of minor bugs fixed.

Functionality:
• The default number of printed cards on the sheet is now 8 or 10 cards (depends on the layout you print on). Only one card was printed out by default in the previous versions.
• Following the requests of our users, we have extended the supported paper base by adding the old Avery templates. Time and proven that men and have had been.

Charles Moore reviews Business Card Composer 1.0.3

New in Business Card Composer 1.0.3