Macsimum News - Freshly Squeezed Reviews: Last Piece of the label printing puzzle

Freshly Squeezed Reviews: Last Piece of the label printing puzzle

Posted by Frank Petrie Apple ico Apr 12, 2005 at 12:05am

Steroids. They’re not just for sports anymore. Time to juice up Mac OS X. For example, printing phone list and labels from Address Book. Excellent start, Apple, but I need to be able to print tags, contact lists with faces, holiday gift labels. etc. from AB for it to completely satisfy my demands! (Is that me or The Clear talking?) And I want to be able to finish off my half used label sheets, too!

The authors at Midnight Mage Software have created RollCall Directory 1.2, an application so tightly integrated with Address Book that you’ll have difficulty determining where the one begins and the other one ends. Says Midnight Mage: “No longer be limited by Mac OS X Address Book printing capabilities! Specify the appearance of the address book YOU want to have! Set multiple columns, set the fields to display, change the font, size, style, color, and other layout options. Print with the simplicity that RollCall Directory provides combined with the power of OS X.”

Hard copies and tags and bears, oh my! Let us gaze, my pretties! [That reference has absolutely nothing to do with this article, if anything. We regret its inclusion. Probably just the steroids again.]

The Juice

Install. Now print addresses in any way that you have ever wanted to print them before.

RollCall Directory is so customizable, I don’t know where to begin. You can create hard copies of your Address Book listings with or without pictures or customized artwork. It automatically puts them in alphabetical order, with a heading for each letter so that they’re grouped. You can create nametags with or without pictures or customized artwork. You can create gift tags with or without pictures or customized artwork.

Why? Because RCD is tightly integrated with Address Book, just like Apple’s iApps. From within the app you can pick through your groups and such. Print out exactly the fields that you want. Choose the color and type of font. How many columns you’d like.

You can pick the color and adjust fonts in every kind of way you could wish for. (Have you noticed that it’s the labeling capabilities that I’m really excited about?)

The Help File is very good, and there is an excellent video on Midnight Mage site that gives you a brief how-to of the program. I highly recommend that you watch this before you even launch the program.

The Pits

More pre-configured label choices would be nice, but in no way is that a deal breaker!. It has the standard label and envelope sizes ready to pick from, so you’re not exactly left out in the cold. The only thing that I consider a slight negative is that there is no way to auto adjust margins for specific labels. For example, for an Avery 8160 label, the default size is for four lines. But if my address is only three, I’m left with a huge gap at the bottom. A bit annoying.

The Rind

Nada.

The Pulp

Another no-brainer. RollCall Directory 1.2 costs US$14.99. At this low price, it will relieve me of hours of messing about with AppleWorks to blow through my holiday taggings and mailings.

I hope this is the kind of development that Apple is encouraging from third parties to beef up its existing software. Cause this is fantastic. I can do all my mailings from the database of one existing existing app, already in place. Indispensable.

Think I’ll print out a label to BALCO.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10.

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or higher.

Have a product you’d like us to review? E-mail dsellers@macsimumnews.com

Frank Petrie is a freelance writer, curmudgeon, technologies and products specialist.