Customer Reviews

Print Explosion Deluxe 3.0 (Mac) [Old Version]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

This should be called "Print Disappointment". It's buggy, some of the really cool features, like color gradations on a shape, don't work. You can't open networked files. The clipart is amateurish. There is a very limited colorset. I asked tech support about that and they said it can't be expected to provide the same features as professional software. Well, I've been using Printmaster on a PC for 8 years, it cost $20, and the earliest version I used worked better than this product.

I bought this program because it was the best MAC OS X progam out there for digital scrapping that I could find. The scrapbooking graphics and digital papers are surprisingly good. There are lots of different papers, from crumpled, inked, striped, circles and bordered. There are lots of embellishments like tags, fibers, shapes and velum. Outside of the scrapbooking graphics, the graphics can be a bit cheesy. There are lots of templates or a person can create a layout from scratch.

There are lots of fonts, with many of them resident on the DVD bonus fonts folder. Currently there is a bug that does not allow all the fonts from the bonus folder to load. The tech people say they are working on an update to fix this.

When creating more than one page scrapbooking Layouts, be aware that once a page is created, the layout order cannot be adjusted. This was a bummer, because I wanted to create a theme album in a digital format. The tech people said they expect people to print out their pages and then switch them around if necessary. I think that is absurd!

There are graphic tools to create your own shapes, but there is no drawing tool, so doodling on your layout is not possible. Bummer!

The program integrates with iLife 06, such as iPhoto which is nice. I can drag and drop a photo into the program easily. And since it integrates with iPhoto and the iLife suite, it does not come with a photo editor or scrapbook DVD option. I guess they figure you should be able to do this with your Mac already.

So, for simple digital layouts of 1 or 2 pages it is great. It gives you the option of saving your layout as a jpeg image file. The scrapbook gallery art is impressive and gives great results. I would recommend it, with recommendations for some changes in future versions of this program.

I was looking for a greeting card program to use on my G4 iMac, as I missed my programs from my PC. Print Explosion Deluxe takes a long time to open and operate. The organization is also poor. ALL greeting cards are lumped together alphabetically by the name of the card. It operates at random whether or not you can access subdivisions such as Halloween, Get Well, etc. when looking for greeting cards. I'll keep using it because I spent so much money on it, but it irks me every time I attempt to use it. I suggest you keep looking for another program.

As a professional art director who has used both Macs and PCs, I'm very familiar with the two major professional publishing programs, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign (and also with Framemaker and Pagemaker) and own each of them on my Mac. However, I was looking for something quick, fun, and EASY to make greeting cards. This was the only product I could find to do this on my Mac. After reading the reviews on here, I was prepared to be disappointed - but thankfully I was not. It gives me the greeting cards I was looking for, and even more. Is it perfect? No. For example, I can't for the life of me get it to print envelopes in the orientation that my printer feeds them, which is frustrating. I also had some initial problems with some features not working and contacted their Tech Support. Although they never did come up with the answer, they did continue to try to help me with repeated emails. (I figured out the problem on my own; the product absolutely needs to be installed on the same drive as your operating system, or else some features won't work; in my case, Publish in HTML wasn't working - I have two internal hard drives and had installed the program on the drive with the most room, which in most cases works fine, and with programs where it won't work, the program tells you that and won't allow you to install on a secondary drive; Print Explosion will allow you to, which is not a good thing). I had a program years ago on my Mac that did greeting cards and contained a database of expressions and greetings and pithy sayings you could use to create the actual word content of a card; I miss that with this program. What I wasn't expecting but was really happy to use was the ability to create emails (without using something like Dreamweaver, which is how I do it at work) and instantly send them from within Print Explosion. Also, what other reviewers have noted about creating calendars is true - it's a pain; you can only create one month at a time and the calendar pictured on the box is misleading; you can't make them look like that unless you do it manually. But for the price and the amazing amount of nice clipart included, I am quite happy with this purchase. Of course, I really only wanted to do greeting cards, but I have done email greetings that have thrilled and amazed my friends. :-)

I've tried to use Print Explosion Delux on a new iMac running 10.6. You can not use one of the main features - the 'Inspector' window without the application crashing. It crashes when you select any italics font ( in the inspector window). I sent all the crash and log information Nova Development would need to fix this application.

6 email exchanges and 2 calls to escalated support later....I was told they are aware of the crash and have no information about the product being fixed.

How can Nova Development continue selling a product that they know is so broken? I'm hoping someone in this thread can suggest a better alternative.

I do have 2 good things to say about Nova Development's Print Explosion Deluxe 3.0: 1st is that there is a 30-day money back guarantee, so I am only out time, not out all my money (I I'm fairly certain that they won't refund my shipping costs). 2nd is that support responded to my emails in less than the 24 hours the website states it will take to get a response from them.

I can print an existing project, or a "template", but I can not modify a template nor can I create a new project, because the second I try to insert a graphic, Print Explosion Deluxe 3 Quits Unexpectedly.

I sent several emails to Nova Development support with my problem yesterday. (I sent several because I tried different things - It crashed when I tried to modify an existing project, so I tried creating a new project - it crashed; so I tried rebooting the system then creating a new project - it still crashed). Nova Development sent me the same message w/ a different support case # to each of my emails instructing me how to uninstall Print Explosion Deluxe 3, then to reinstall from DVD, then instructions how to download and install the update. I followed Supports instructions to the letter... and instant crash when I tried to insert a Graphic Object into a New project.

So I emailed again, and included the crash dump - and all Support told me was how to go about getting my money back.

I'm very disappointed because I have Print Explosion 1.0 that runs on my older PowerBook running OS 9. I bought Print Explosion Deluxe 3.0 to run on my Mac Pro running Mac OS X mainly to be able to create my own mailing labels (return address labels and package labels mainly - I'm not doing mail merge to create mailing labels from a mailing list).

Sign me Not A Happy Repeat Customer

I had always used Print Shop on Windows but when I switched to imac I purchased Print Explosion. Sorry mistake. The program has 1000's of graphics but it's almost impossible to find what you want as there is no "Search" feature. The graphics are also very juvenille in appearance. I called Nova to verify this and he confirmed a simple search feature was not added. I continued to use the program anyway but found it was constantly shutting down, losing all my work. I finally reverted to saving every click. This was the last straw so I contacted Nova again and asked for a refund. They were very helpful and I got my refund in about 5 weeks after I mailed back the software. With my money I'm buying Print Shop for Mac.

I bought this because I wanted a program to make greeting cards and such on my Mac. This was all I could find. It is terrible! It constantly crashes in the middle of designing a project. The graphics are very elementary and there is no way to search for a particular graphic. Browsing through the cards is also a difficult process. It doesn't allow you to see the inside of a card without choosing it for your project. If you decide you don't like it, you have to restart the entire process for creating a greeting card. Lastly, I spent 30 minutes creating a card that imported some of my own pictures. Everything was perfect on the screen, but when I previewed it for printing, it had substituted random parts of the pictures to display. I've used many greeting card programs, including American Greetings Creatacard, Hallmark Card Studio Deluxe, and Print Shop, and this is by far the worst program I have ever used.

new to mac, but not new to making cards, banners etc, this program is just annoying, has a mind of it own, often shuts down right when I'm ready to print, or will close in the middle of a project, losing everything I've put into it. I'm so grateful I still have my hp and all the software that I had for it to rely on, for this program really does stink. If anyone knows of a program that their thrilled with to make cards and calendars and banners with on a mac, if you would post would love to hear about it. If my vote counts, I say save your money...and also watch out if you try and order the new hallmark for mac, they just charged me 3 times and came back each time saying my info wasn't good which I know it is, so now I get to dispute 3 charges...I'm just saying, looks cool, but I wouldn't give them your info online. Peace

This is just a fun program for making scrapbook pages and collages. It has lots of templates for a lot of different projects and this is a good place to start out if you need some direction. The blanks allow you to be as creative as you want! It is inexpensive, but allows you to do lots of fun and creative projects. Enjoy!!