The Print Shop for Mac (OS X Edition)

$49.95, Mac OS

Teaches: creativity, printing, art, photography

CTR Review

Finally! A solid, powerful, kid & teacher friendly printing/design program for the Macintosh. Yes indeed, the wait is finally over, for those tired of the dumbed-down version of KidPix, and the complexity and expense of PhotoShop. The most welcome features include the ability to work directly with iPhoto for importing your own images, and the increased power over the graphics. For example, you can now import your school logo, make it 30% transparent (sort of like a watermark), put a nice drop shadow behind it, and then save it as a PDF or print it out. The menus are easy to figure out -- there are often two or three ways to do something, and it is easy to pick up an element, move it, edit it, or erase it. There are 15 types of projects supported, including greeting cards, letterhead, scrapbooks, calendars and business cards. Once you select a project, you can either jump directly to a blank page, or move to a "QuickStart" layout. To check depth of content, we searched on the word "soccer" as a keyword in the image library, and came up with 31 images, including a photograph of a soccer game and a real soccer ball; enough to pass the test in the all-important clip art department. While you can export individual graphics as high resolution, your projects are limited to screen resolution, which is too low for most professional printers. The program does handle a variety of standard graphics formats for both importing and exporting, making this a handy graphics tool for web design work, or for that last minute flyer you need to make. All in all, you'll be nothing less than thrilled with this outstanding new graphics tool. Note that if you have anything less than System 10.1.5 (OS X), this is not the version you want (there is an older version).