January 2005

By: Ric Getter

There is more to being successful in business than image, but looking good never hurts. A lot of the time, you get to make that first important first impression even before your client opens the envelope. With some effort, you can coerce your word processor or database to create your labels and envelopes. However, we have lacked the convenience and versatility of a well-designed labeling program since Avery's MacLabel Pro failed to make the transition to X.

Happily, an excellent, OS X born-and-bred solution has arrived from the distant shores of the Black Sea. Mail Factory from BeLight Software in Odessa, Ukraine is a beautifully crafted program that produces great looking labels and envelopes with a minimum of effort. And, unlike MacLabel Pro, it claims no brand loyalty and has templates for virtually all major label manufacturers and the flexibility to design your own. It is also a program without borders. You will find layouts that comply with the specifications of nearly every country with a postal system. Mail Factory can let you fine-tune the output to make up for variations in different printers' paper-feed (even though we did not find this necessary on either our laser or inkjet printers) and it is completely compatible with Dymo's LabelWriters.

Initially, Mail Factory starts up in an “Assistant” mode that will lead you step-by-step through the process of creating a label or envelope.

It is useful when you are first learning the program, but turns out to be hardly necessary once you have mastered a few basics. The standard view places all the tools you need to create and customize your labels at your fingertips. The tools and Inspector windows offer the level of control and convenience you are used to seeing in expensive graphics and layout applications. You will rarely find a need to sift through the menu bar for a command or feature. As an OS X native application, it makes full use of Cocoa's extensive typography tools.

Instant Access

One of the keys to the usefulness of a labeling program is how well it understands your address data. This is a realm where Mail Factory excels (pun intended). The program instantly accesses addresses from Address Book, Entourage, Eudora, Now Contact, vCards, delimited text and even Excel and FileMaker with no need for importing. (As of this writing, Palm Desktop was not on the list, but it is fairly easy to export that file so it can be opened as a vCard.) With the other formats, you simply tell Mail Factory where to look and the addresses appear. If your address source is a web page or e-mail, the “Paste as Address” option will intelligently parse your Clipboard and insertthe contents into the appropriate address field.

Even though the program only includes the basic line and rectangle drawing tools, it comes with an easily expandable clip art library. If you need something a little more graphic, Mail Factory talks to your iPhoto database as fluently as it does your Address Book. Any image in your photo library can be dragged onto a label, scaled and cropped as you see fit. If you cannot find the right picture in your collection, Mail Factory will scour the web using Google's image search. Once you find the image you need, the Inspector window gives you the ability to rotate, flip, tint, add masks and gradients, or adjust the opacity of an image. Of course, this may be a bit much for mailing labels, but the program can just as easily be used for videos and CDs.

Rules & Guidelines

The documentation reminds you, however, that the post office like to scan labels with computers and getting too artistic can interfere with the process. While you are tweaking your label's layout, you can call up visual guidelines that show you where your country's postal service likes to see the different elements. Mail Factory will automatically translate your addressee's Zip Code into a postal bar code that can appear above or below the address. Another nice touch is that it will optionally format the address as all caps. One other particularly thoughtful addition is well worth the mention. There is a separate clip art library of all those special handling labels like “Fragile” or “Do Not Bend” that you so often need but never seem to have at hand.

Mail Factory as a whole is full of these friendly little features that show a great deal of thought and consideration for the user.

The interface is clean and intuitive, with the abundant variety of features conveniently accessible but never obtrusive. In our testing, the program was solid and stable, but it still has a couple of rough edges in need of some smoothing. BeLight has been shipping regular updates that work out the kinks as well as adding an impressive array of new features with each release. It is clear that BeLight is working hard to provide Mac users around the world with top-notch software that is an excellent value.

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