EASER  I do love this program. But I wish they would allow me to group objects. Yes, I can select multiple objects and move them as a group, but that's not the same as creating one large, grouped object which I can maneuver at will. I wrote them awhile back and asked for this feature, and they said it would be in the next release. I do not see it. Bummer.  (Version 2.3)

HENRYAZ  This a continued review. In my previous review, I covered some quirks and how SP was too slow on my eMac when dealing with large images. I've used SP on another project on my MacBook 2.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, OS 10.5.1.

SP is much more responsive on this machine. Typing with large images is responsive, causing me to wonder if the problem with my past machine was related to the configuration of the machine or actually was a problem with SP.

SP still displays many of the same quirks mentioned in my earlier review, including the faulty text wrap which causes text to disappear out of the text box until the text box is resized overly large.

The extended clip art collection is WORTH EVERY DOLLAR. The photos included are hi-res, and quite stunning. I used many clips from the clip art collection to come up with a very nice postcard for a direct mailing. Wife said it was the best looking postcard I'd done yet -- and it is largely due to the quality of the clip art.

Alas, there are many things that are still annoying in the product. Text Styles does not behave as you would expect. I took the trouble to set up some styles for the texts I was using. When I decided to update the font within a style, two problems showed up: a) Using the font panel to edit a style did not always generate the expected results, seemingly especially when dealing with small font sizes. Multiple times, I tried to set a style to a font size of 3, and it instead changed from 4 pt (what it was set to previously) to 9 pt. (b) If that weren't annoying enough, when I did successfully update a style, none of the text on which that style had previously been applied actually updated to the new style! I had to go and manually reapply the style to the paragraphs to get them to reflect the new fonts. It seems that styles are merely a place to store font information which can be applied with a simple pull down menu, but the text remains independent of the style and does not update when the style is changed.

Generating a PDF did not behave as expected. In my postcard, the printer asked for .125" bleed. I'd set up the page to the expected postcard size (5.6x4.25). Swift Pub has the ability to generate a PDF with the bleed showing. However, if I asked SP to generate a PDF with the extra bleed, more often than not, the resulting PDF was still 5.6x4.25, instead of 5.85x4.5. Even worse, the bleed showed up in the left and top sides of the page, and the bottom and right sides were clipped by the bleed amount. Here are the PDF generating methods that failed to produce a proper bleed: Print->Preview, Print->Print Panel->Preview, Export PDF + PDFX filter. The only way I could get a PDF with the proper bleed was to export the PDF with NO filters applied.

UNDO sometimes did not immediately show up in what I was doing. When I was changing colors on some words in the text, I decided to undo the change. When nothing showed up, I instinctively did apple-Z several times. When I finally clicked outside the image area, I discovered that I'd done several undos. Undoing a font color change does not draw on the screen correctly until I clicked outside of any object.

Some other things I liked: I like the master templates, and the foreground/background tabs for each page. To insure I was following the proper margins for my postcard, I downloaded a PNG from the postcard site and pasted into the background of a page. With the PNG resized appropriately, I could then set the opacity of the PNG to very light. This gave me a nice guide when I edited the postcard in the foreground. When I was ready to print (or generate a PDF), I went into the background and changed the opacity of the PNG to zero. This effectively hid the reference image yet left it there for me to reveal again if I needed it.

SP never crashed on me - this is a GOOD sign. Frequently, shareware crashes on me while I experiment with it.

Summary: I find Pages much easier to use and more intuitive. Pages does not seem to have some of the features of SP, like editable master templates. I really like the clip art you can get with SP. One thing that makes SP really shine is the Link Back feature, which allows me to edit material in the original app that generated the material. However, the quirkiness of the UI to SP is an obstacle to me wanting to use it all the time. I imagine that I will lean towards Pages for my general use of DTP.  (Version 2.2)

HENRYAZ  Many folks have written about the nice aspects of this program. One under-reported feature I like is the support for LinkBack, which would allow me to use programs like Intaglio to edit the graphic objects that are embedded in SP docs. But, for this mini-review, I will focus on the problems that prevent me from using SP.

VERY SLOW on an eMac G4 800MHz 512MB 10.4.11, even when all other apps have been quit. Incidentally, OS was reinstalled from scratch - erasing the whole disk - 4 days before, so the machine is fairly clean. After initially being impressed by its feature set in the trial version, decided to purchase and try to create a layout of a calendar page with 7 6MP photos on it. Images are all on a local hard disk. Loaded the 7 images onto a page. Clicking and dragging them had a very noticeable delay. If I moved the mouse immediately after clicking, the image would not be under the mouse cursor once the image started moving. Adding a text box and typing into it was painful. I counted 4 seconds between each letter rendering.

During the typing, the CPU is pegged at 100%. There is also periodic reading from the disk (presumably paging in). Clearly SP is busy doing something for every letter I type.

LAYOUT BUGGY. Telling an object to have text wrap around it would completely make the text disappear from its rectangle. I realized that if I resized the text box quite large, the text would show up at different places within the text box (say, at the bottom, or later at the top of the box), depending upon its size. I could find a sizing where the text would show up in the appropriate place, but then I was left with a text box 5 times larger than the text warranted.

SAVING SLOW. Making a minor change in layout and then resaving the file meant having to wait close to a minute for the file to finish saving. Perhaps the program is completely resaving every time I click save, instead of saving only the layout change.

QUIRKY INTERFACE. Features are nice, but I found the object rotation interface quite quirky and buggy. You can not grab a corner in any manner and rotate an object. You must use a slider, but the slider is so small that the resolution of a step is too many degrees (jumping from 0 degrees to 7 degrees). Using the up/down arrows didn't seem to update the rotation. A few times, the up/down arrow seemed to get stuck going up or down, even after I'd released the mouse button.

As an aside, it strikes me that SP is not using standard OS X controls or event management, but rather attempting to read the status of the mouse/keyboard on the fly - a risky behavior in any program, particularly in older machines which may not respond as quickly as the faster, newer machines.

A new mac is on order, so perhaps I will like SP on my new MacBook when it arrives. But for my eMac, I find SP too unusable.  (Version 2.2)

ECHO24  Great application, both intuitive and powerful. Others (like those in Redmond) should watch and learn - also what the pricing is concerned.  (Version 2.1.2)