Review: Labels & Addresses from Belight Soft - Best Label Program on the Mac

Printing labels on the Mac isn't as easy as it should be. This became extremely apparent to me when my wife suddenly had the need to process postcards at an alarming rate for a project she was working on. I tried a few different applications, but none other than Belight's Labels & Addresses even came close to meeting my needs. Instead of a catch all program most people use, like MS Word or Apple's Pages, this is a SPECIFIC application that does precise labels, envelopes, mail merges, etc… and does it exactly right.

Setting up your first printing is extremely easy - they even have an assistant to get you started. Each one can customized to your own granular needs. The basic assistant offers you pre-defined designs, labels, addresses, and postcards. Most of them are good looking and well thought out, and can easily be customized to meet your needs. This is really for people that don't have an idea, but can use these as baselines and then go in and customize them.

It supports hundreds of  popular pre-defined media types and they are easily searchable. If you need an Avery - 10 Video Tape label, no problem -- they've got it.  If they don't most pre-packaged labels tell you the dimensions, so you can input those into a custom label set.

Labels and Addresses offers importing and placement of everything you could possibly need for creating the perfect printouts. Not only does it already come with a plethora of built-in clip art, but you can import images from your current libraries, create images with Belight's Art Text (if you own it), pre-defined handling labels, and even barcodes. I was impressed by the sheer amount of flexibility this application offers. For example, alignment tools are key for making your labels, cards, envelopes look great. Whenever you move something, the alignment bars pop up showing you exactly how everything aligns with the other.

Merge printing is excellent, offering the ability to create specific lists from your addresses (it pulls your addresses from Apple Address Book, Microsoft Entourage, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Now Contact and File Maker Pro). Additionally, during the printing process, you can also specify whether you want the country name surprised, cut marks, what label to start from ( we all have sheets around with just a few labels left on them).

The flexibility of the program is perfect for the home user as well as a small business. If you want to increase the clip-art, they have an add-on pack that adds 40,000+ high quality images, and one that includes an additional 100 fonts. During my testing I shipped out 100 postcards, 200 mailing labels, and printed off some labels for my binders. Each one was done with ease - which really makes me appreciate this application.

Conclusion

With the level of sophistication and flexibility this product offers, I could never go back to using the cumbersome Pages or Word to create labels. By far, this is absolutely the definitive Labels, Addresses, Envelopes application for your Mac. In fact, it's the best I've used on ANY platform. As hard as I tried to find something wrong with it, I couldn't. Highly recommended.

Product: Labels & Addresses

Company: Belight Software

Price: $24.99 in the Mac App Store -- or from their Web site, where you can get a Free Trial.

Review: AddressBookSync - Facebook Pictures in your Address Book

Have a Facebook account? How would you like to sync up your contacts pictures with their corresponding pictures from their Facebook profile. It's easy to do -- with AddressBookSync.

To use this app, you simply launch it, authorize it to look at your Facebook account and then select the contacts you want to sync. There are two tabs to choose from. Matched (contacts that seem to be a proper match) and Unmatched (contacts that you may not be Facebook friends of, or for some reason it couldn't detect them as a match).

Remove a checkmark from any contact you don't want synced and then choose 'Sync to Address Book'.

It does it's syncing and now you can open Address Book and you should see pictures with your matched contacts.  Pretty cool.

According tot he developer, Facebook doesn't allow syncing of email addresses or phone numbers, so you will need to add these manually.

Excellent little app,  it's free, and it works with OS X Lion. Unfortunately it's not available in the app store, but you can download it here.

Review: Epson Stylus Photo R1900 Wide Format Printer

Quick Overview

If you are looking to print some of the best pictures out there, the Epson Stylus Photo R1900 is one of the finest machines that has come across my review desk. While it comes in with a very large physical footprint 24.2(w) x 12.5 (d) x 8.5 (h), it more than makes up for it with it's speed and high quality prints from it's pigment based inks. 

The Epson R1900 handles most media with ease, with sizes ranging from 4" x 6" to 13" x 44" if using a roll paper. During my testing I tried 11.7" x 16.5", 8.5" x 11", 5" x 7", regular single sheet paper, and a variety of samples from matte to glossy. It handled all of these, and performed quite well in my tests.

For those printer geeks, Epson says it has a MicroPiezo AMC print head. 180 nozzles x 8 color channels, up to 5760 x 1440 dpi, as small as a 1.5 picoliter ink droplet. That's more info than I needed to know, but for those that love the tech specs, enjoy.

As far as speed,  Epson touts speeds for  5 x 7 in 59 sec, 8 x 10 in 96 sec, and 11 x 14 in 156 sec, all in the 'Best Photo Mode' setting. During my testing, the speeds were on track with what they said, but sometimes slower or faster depending on the size and resolution of the images.

Hardware Install

If you've setup a printer before, this is no different -- it's your typical printer installation. Follow along the quick start guide and remove all of the pieces of tape inside and out of the printer. Power it up, insert the inks, and it will prime all of them for you. Finally, connect the USB cable to the rear of the printer, but not to the computer yet - you want to install the drivers first. This printer comes with two USB 2.0 high speed ports. You can connect one cable to your Desktop and one to your Laptop, which is something I never thought I would use, until I used it. If you only have one machine, you can use the second USB port connect it to your camera and print from your camera if it supports the PictBridge standard. I didn't get to test this, but Epson assures me it works. An SDCard slot is omitted, but since this printer has no display screen, there would be no way to view/navigate the images to print anyway.

Software Install

Insert the DVD and click on the Epson Install icon and it launches a wizard that gives you the options for the R1900 driver, Epson PRINT CD (for printing on CD/DVD media), and the Epson Reference guide. I chose to install all of them, but if you don't think you will be printing CD/DVD media, you can skip that one. Start the installation and Mac OS X will prompt you for your admin password before proceeding. As the installation progresses, pay attention because at some point during the install it will ask you to connect your printer and turn it on.

The installation can take several minutes, and at one point I thought it totally stopped, but eventually it did finish and asked me to print a test page. My initial install went without any problems at all.

One thing to note: I checked Software Update on my Mac, and it did show some new Epson printer drivers for my version of OS X Snow Leopard - 10.6.7. After you install the basic drivers, I suggest you try and run Software Update too.

Printing Tests

Now that everything was setup, I quickly fired up iPhoto and inserted a 4" x 6" blank piece of Epson photo paper into the R1900. I found a nice looking photo with a subject up against a blue sky and figured this would be able to provide me with a nice contrast of skin and sky. The native resolution was 1936 x 2592 JPEG, an image taken outside with my iPhone 4. Normally I wouldn't make my first print with something off of my phone, but since the iPhone 4 has such a magnificent camera when used outdoors, I knew it would be a fine test subject.  Also, in our household, it's usually the only camera we have with us, and 90% of our pictures are taken with our iPhone 4 cameras.  

As it printed, I wondered how this would fare, since typically when I print from iPhoto, the prints always come out a little bit darker than I thought they would. It's probably an issue since my monitor isn't calibrated to match my printer, so it's natural to expect things won't look EXACTLY like they do on screen. Not to digress, but If I really cared about it, I would get the calibration tool. If you are a professional reading this, you probably have already done this, and will get even better results and performance out of the R1900 than I did. 

After printing the 4" x 6" I was very impressed with the quality of the printout. It printed in about 40 seconds, with a few of those seconds afforded to the printer warming up. Not bad at all. The print was just as good, if not better than other printers I have previously tested. However, this printer is physically big, so I wanted to start testing all of the available media types I had on hand.

Next I tried printing that same image on 5" x 7" photo paper. Again, it looked great! This imaged printed in under a minute, and was on track with what Epson told me in their literature (59seconds in Best Photo Mode). Once again, impressive. My next test was an 8.5" x 11" print of the same image I had been using. This one printed, but took about 1min 45 seconds. Again, some of this time was the printer warming up but that still factors into the overall print time. The 8.5" x 11" looked OK, but nothing I would put on display in my living room. With this particular photo, I think I reached it's limit, as it started to look grainy. Passable to the passerby, but not crisp like I expect my 'display' photos to look. This isn't really a limitation of the R1900, but more the resolution and lighting of the image I was using. 

For the larger prints I needed to upgrade the resolution, so I found some photos taken with my Panasonic DMC-ZS3. These were taken with a resolution of 3648 x 2736, much more suitable for 8x10 and larger. I inserted some of the 8.5" x 11" Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster and this time I had superb results. The luster paper gave me a photo that resembled something you would get from Sears or other portrait studio. It wasn't a glossy finish like we typically get with 4" x 6" & 5" x 7", but a beautiful rich looking image with little glare. With the combination of this paper and the R1900's ability, this photo looked exquisite. It was on par with any printers I have tested in the past, and in my opinion it surpassed them.

Still, most printers can print at least an 8" x 10", so now came the real test - BIG PHOTOS. Epson supplied me with some 11" x 16.5" premium photo glossy paper, so that is the largest I could try. Since I didn't want to waste my test ink, I found one of the best pictures in my library I could find - a family picture taken with a Nikon D80 at a resolution of 2592 x 3872 TIFF file. I inserted the paper into the R1900, hit print in iPhoto, selected A3 from the paper type, selected the proper paper, and pressed the print button.  In under three minutes I had an incredible  keepsake that immediately went on the wall in my living room. I was HIGHLY impressed with the quality. Colors were vivid and dynamic, there were no detectible smears or defects in the photo at all. To see something so high quality coming out of  a printer sitting next to me and not at the photolab was fantastic. In fact, I've had prints done at a professional lab before that didn't even come close to this. The downside with printing large images like this though is the ink. Ink quickly gets eaten up, especially if you make a mistake and print the wrong thing (like I did later in testing!). For example, if you try and print a large photo with a large amount of one specific color, that ink color is going to get used up more quickly than if you print pictures with varying colors, and not too much of one particular one. If you do a picture of the sky, expect the colors that make up the sky (e.g. Cyan) to deplete quicker than your red. I didn't try any black and white photos, because my experience with ink jets in the past is the black depletes too quickly. It's a good idea to use the ink monitor tool installed with your printer drivers to keep an eye on your ink levels.

Panoramic Printing

This is where I really wanted to try to test the limits of this printer. So many photo apps make it easy to create panorama pics, it's only natural you would want to print your own panoramic shots. This is where the testing became more difficult. I couldn't find any apps on the Mac to print panoramic pictures. I tried fooling around and adjusting some of the iPhoto settings with no success, and finally gave Apple's high end Aperture a try and was able to get out a small panoramic picture by making some adjustments in the print dialog. Still, this didn't turn out as I had hoped. This printer has so much potential, I hate to be limited by the software. 

Since I didn't have the roll paper, I used the A3 paper, and due to my panoramic image being so wide, it printed out a 16.5" wide postcard size image that had to be cut out. Not exactly what I was looking for, but it's the best I could do during my testing. Perhaps on the PC there are some better solutions, but on the Mac, I was unable to find them. 

Regular A3 on top, and the Panorama on bottom.

INK

Once of the reasons these photos look so great is because of the Epson UltraChrome Hi-Gloss 2 pigment ink that has an improved gloss optimizer and new red and orange inks. It can even auto-switch between photo and matte black types regardless of the media inserted, so you will always get the deepest blacks, regardless. Pretty cool. 

While I can't give a definite on how much Ink this R1900 has used during my testing, I can tell you that so far I have printed thirty 4" x 6", ten 5" x 7", eight 11.7" x 16.5" images, as well as five 8.5" x 11.5" photos.  The only time I was prompted to replace the ink was when the 'GLOSS OPTIMIZER' ran out. It wouldn't let me print anything with even one ink low. Since they weren't high capacity ink cartridges I was extremely surprised I was able to print that much out of the stock ink that comes with the unit. 

Refill ink price is about $13 per cartridge - and there are eight of them, so you need to factor that into the cost. Depending on the types of images you  print, you will see that some inks get used more than others. So you may not replace all of the inks at once, but it's probably a good idea to keep spare  around, due to the fact you are unable to print if ANY of them are out. 

Conclusion

Overall, I love this R1900 printer. You can use it for printing photos of all sizes and will end up with fantastic results that look better than most photo labs. The overall footprint of the R1900 is big on your desk, but if you need to print large photos, I think it is well worth making a place for it next to your Mac. I really liked the speed and quality of the printing, and it's construction gives it an overall professional feel to the printer. Make no mistake, it can print on paper, but it has Photo in the name and you don't want to get this for your everyday printer. Get a cheap all-in-one for that, and use this for your high quality photo printing. Easily a 4.75 out of 5. Highly recommended. 

Product

Epson Stylus Photo R1900

Price: $549.99 USD, cheaper on Amazon

Pros

• Excellent print quality
• Prints on variety of media sizes and types
• Speedy and quiet

Cons

• Very large physical footprint
• Wont print unless all cartridges have ink
• Pricey

Review: Live Interior 3D by BeLight Software

The folks at BeLight Software are a hard working crew, constantly working to improve their products. I am taking a look at this new version of Live Interior 3D (Stnadard Edition). I’m a bit familiar with this application, but there are enough changes that I’m going to pretend I’ve never seen Live Interior before.

What Does It Do?

Let’s talk about what Live Interior can do. This application is designed to help any layperson or professional build a house, decorate a room and even rearrange the furniture. It looks a lot like any Mac Software. Menu and Tool bar at the top of the window; there’s a column on the left, in this case, full of items to populate your rooms. In the center of the screen, you have a main window and off to the right, an Inspector window. This is all probably comfortable to anyone who uses iWork, iLife or various design products. It’s mostly self-explanatory once you know what a few of the icons mean.

Along the top you see icons to control the left column; these included architectural listings, furniture listings and a project tree. The project tree lists all your objects for the project you have open, which makes finding or selecting stuff easier. At the bottom of the column is a 3D preview. Above the main window are tools for wall and floor additions, measurements, cameras, zooming and the page grab tool. The tool bar will give you 3D icons, such as lighting and navigation, when in 3D viewing mode. The tool bar is customizable. Finally on the right we have the ‘view toggling’ icons (2D/3D or both), an inspector icon and the ‘Google Warehouse’ button.

The Inspector window, like any inspector in Mac software, gives you details of whatever object you’re looking at, be it furniture, wall etc. This includes measurements, materials (when applicable) and specific lighting and orientation. The Inspector also groups the selected object among similar objects, which makes it easy to find like objects, with subtle differences, in case you need to change objects. Any interior designer will tell you there is a world built on 50 shades of white, all similar but distinctly different.

When setting up a new project, it would be smart o set up your preferences for measurements, scale, graphic settings and autosaving. There is also a separate ‘environment panel’ (in the ‘window’ menu) that will set your overall lighting, which can be guided by your compass and latitude orientation.

To begin the building of rooms, storeys and houses you simply drag and drop walls or objects. You can check out the lists of walls and start drawing from scratch, then add various features like windows, doors, furniture, lighting by dragging and dropping objects. The default set up of the application includes some ‘snap to’ settings to help you line things up on a wall. You can also add a series of objects and distribute and align them from the ‘arrange’ menu. Floors and ceilings are added automatically, but are customizable. You can also use the ‘edit’ menus to add storeys, roofs and your own images. In the ‘view’ menu, you can change the type of lighting for different times of day.

More Useful Details

Let’s take a closer look at the toggle view icons found in the tool bar and commands found in the menu. First, you can switch between 2D and 3D or have both. BeLight recommends you do your initial building in 2D, since it’s easier to see your project lay out this way. 3D view is recommended for the furnishing and materials stage of your project.

When you open LiveInterior, you are greeted with the opening of the room assistant. You can choose what kind of room/building you are decorating to easily load up a pre-existing floor plan. Another window that opens for your perusal is the video tutorial window. BeLight has worked on a series of easy and useful videos to explain the basic features and use of Live Interior.

The available objects/materials library comes as a separate installation and is extensive. There is also direct access to the Google Warehouse library, which contains a huge, shared resource of buildings, objects, furniture as well as things you wouldn’t use, like cars. You can download, for example, the Vatican’s library of objects, building materials or architectural plans.
 
When you’re done building you can place cameras in the room/building and then toggle into 3D view and take a more realistic look at your building. This includes your own pictures, textures and furniture. You can set up a walking tour, via the movie tracks and movie recording, to see how you might feel walking into a room. The great thing about this feature is that you can save all these views, including the movie and export them to be viewed in other applications like Preview or SketchUp. Export options include several 2D and 3D options such as JPG, PNG, PDF, SKP, X3D and QTVR.

How Easy Is It To Use?

Let’s take a look at what it’s like to use this application. A lot of this is probably intuitive to anyone familiar with iWork. You can pick and choose from libraries, drag and drop objects onto your workspace. Most of your tools are readily at your disposal, though you may need a brief time to familiarize yourself with the icons. When you are in the 2D planning mode, adding walls and features is easy. There are ‘snap-to’ features, as well as pop up alignment guides. Keyboard shortcuts like, the shift key help to keep things at straight right angles.

The help menu is extensive, so it is easy to look up things you may not know. There is also a suggested list in the help menu that gives you a good guide of the basic steps to take to build your project. There are definitely a couple of spots to use the help menu. For instance, understanding and setting up storeys and foundations is easier when you’ve perused the help library.  There are a few ‘assistant’ windows to help you choose various objects, such as the roof, environment or detailing objects. I would certainly suggest spending time poking around the inspector when trying objects out for the first time. I didn’t even notice that you could build loft style walls, until taking a thorough look. You’ll also find that objects are impressively customizable; add moulding to walls, add your own objects and materials, resize windows to fit your dimensions. The ‘materials picker’ will let you duplicate anything you’ve done, though it can be awkward, to get used to.

It’s easy to drag and drop cameras, to help you with your 3D viewing. You can  use the navigation arrow controls to view your 3D plans or just mouse around. This may actually be one of the harder aspects to get used to, moving around your 3D space to see how everything looks, feels unusual at first. In 2D viewing, you can set several types of viewing, that may include multiple storeys, roofs etc. Or you may view these all separately. There is a ‘collision’ detector, that will point out possible problem areas. There is a very easy annotation tool, that will drop a text note where ever you point to, so you may add more details to a plan. The measurement tool, will add measurements to anything you select.

You can set up new work from templates, including ones you have made yourself. There are preferences in the main menu where you may change measurement units, tweak viewing details, change start up features and the like.

Finishing Up

Is this an application you need? For beginners, you should know, there is a bit of a learning curve for this application. BeLight is helping you out with a great series of videos and a well organized help library. It does take a bit of practice to get used to the navigation tools. Still, considering the ease of the object library use, the dragging and dropping building ability and the vast resource of Google Warehouse, I think this would be a very useful application to have. If you are a non-professional, it is priced low enough that it could make planning a house or a roomful of decorating easier. If you are a professional, there is a version, slightly more expensive, with additional features available. Most of those features are technical tools such as: in application use of SketchUp for editing 3D objects, more specific lighting design (including multiple lights in one area), unique wall detail (niches, etc) design, and a higher resolution of movies, shared files and plans.

BeLight has worked very hard to make this application user friendly, which considering that is a basic CAD-like application, is impressive. It does feel like you can dive right in and that there is a good library of information to help you along. As a person who has done some building, I did wonder about things like chair-rail and door moulding, crawlspace foundations, attic or bifold doors. Though, since this application is designed to help the layperson with layout and decision making, that’s probably over thinking it. I recently watched some friends and their architect design a new home from scratch and it’s an impressive feat. If my friends had been able to spend a few hours, throwing together ideas for their new home in Live Interior and taken the project to their architect, they may have subtracted a year from the construction. BeLight’s Live Interior 3D has given it’s users a great foundation for their architectural projects.


Live Interior 3D by BeLight Software $49.95 for the Standard Edition, $129.95 for the Pro Edition

Review: Otterbox Defender & Commuter Cases for iPhone 4

Otterbox cases are synonymous with protection. Ask anybody in the know what case to get to protect their expensive phone and it's likely they will reply with "Otterbox". They sent me their Commuter and Defender cases for the iPhone 4, and I've had a few weeks to use them both.

Otterbox iPhone 4 Commuter

The Commuter is the smaller of the two cases. It's made to offer protection, yet do it in a case that is slender as possible, yet still offering the protection that Otterbox is famous for. 

It offers three layers of protection: screen protector, silicone shell, and a hard polycarbonate outer shell.  

Some people prefer not to use a screen protector, and I am one of them. Although, I am quickly becoming a convert, as I've recently found two scratches on the front glass of my iPhone 4. I quickly went searching for the screen protector that came in the Otterbox case and applied it. Pretty simple, clean the screen with the enclosed soft cloth, line up the protector, peel and stick, and smooth out any bubbles.  

Typically, I am not a fan of silicone shells by themselves. They are difficult to get in and out of jeans, and usually they are lint magnets. I spend more time cleaning off the phone than using it. The good news with the Otterbox is the polycarbonate hard shell that goes over the silicone shell, which eliminates almost all of the problems. It offers a solid feel and gives the phone the extra distance needed from the iPhone 4's antenna, so you won't suffer from the weakened signal when you 'hold it wrong'.  

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