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Words by Ric Getter
January 2005
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.
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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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