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Your Trading
Card Maker
Reviewed
by: Lianne
Reitter & Howard
Carson,
updated Jan 2007
Published
by: Enteractive,
Inc.
Requires: Pentium
90 or better, Win 98 through Vista, 16MB RAM, 16MB
hard drive space, color monitor, color printer. Power
Macintosh PPC processor, Mac OS8 or higher, 16MB RAM,
16MB hard drive space, color monitor, color printer
MSRP: $29.95
Sons,
daughters, nephews and nieces — that's what
we're talking about here — and how to make
delightful little gifts for them, how to make them
even more excited than usual about sports and activities,
and how to put a smile on their parents' faces. A
custom, sports trading card will do it every time.
The problem with most trading card makers — essentially
a simple theme template-based layout and printing
program — is that many of them they try to
do way too much. Early versions of MGI (then Roxio,
then Sonic) PhotoSuite are classic examples of what's
wrong with this sort of software. It usually contains
too many features, too many fonts, too many creative
choices, too many decisions and is not intuitively
useful. The point of the exercise is lost in a confusion
of required decisions, and making a simple trading
card using a picture of your kid becomes too much
like hard labor. Enteractive seems to have learned
the hard lessons taught by MGI, Roxio, The Learning
Company, Broderbund, Corel and others, and come up
with a real winner.
First
and foremost, Your Trading Card Maker is dead easy
to use. Installation is brief and mostly uneventful.
Launch the software. Read the simple user interface
- it's presented in the order required to make
a card. Choose one of the excellent card layouts.
Type player stats and descriptions in the text
entry fields provided. Add a picture - we were
able to use JPG, TIF, BMP and GIF without any problems,
and you can use different pictures for the front
and back of the card. Use the simple crop controls
to choose the best part of the picture. That's
it. The printed results are suitable as gifts,
real sports team presentations, novelties and memorabilia.
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For
the record, we needed only five and a half minutes to load
the software, decide on card, import and crop pictures,
edit some of the stats and print the card on a sheet of
custom card paper supplied with the program. That's fast.
The results were excellent - the cards look like they were
store-bought and professionally produced.
The
keys to this type of software are ease of use and the
availability of appropriate specialty paper. Enteractive
has made the software absurdly simple to use and trading
card paper is available in quantity from their web site
(10 sheet pack for $19.95 - 20 cards total) and a few
national software retailers. Online orders are quick
and simple these days. The other keys to success have
to do more with your own 'design' decisions than anything
the software does on its own. First and foremost, the
crop feature is there for a reason. The fact is, some
of our own staff had to be reminded that the best photo
for a trading card is one that's mostly head and chest.
That means you're supposed to use the crop tool to grab
just the part of the picture you'd normally see in a
trading card — usually a head and chest shot (known
as a medium shot), and occasionally a full length shot — both
of which are always tightly cropped. No panoramic views,
as little background as possible, and so on. When in
doubt, grab a trading card pack off the nearest conveience
store shelf and have a look for yourself.
Cons: Some
minor installation problems under Windows XP. A second
try worked perfectly and we traced the problem to our
antivirus software. It's probably good advice to temporarily
turn off your antivirus monitor in order to install any
new software that you know is safe. No installation issues
of any kind on any operating system once we turned antivirus
monitoring off. Don't forget to turn your antivirus monitoring
back on after installation is complete. Can we have a
few more card paper samples in the package please?
Pros: Professional
card layouts — very well designed. Simple, accurate print
instructions and controls. Superb results from almost
any decent inkjet printer (read: almost anything on the
market these days). A good example of what can be done
with Macromedia Director, Flash and Shockwave UI application
design. Speedy, stable operation. As of our January 2007
product revisit both Your Trading Card Maker and its
sister product, Your
Bumper Sticker Maker seem to work well under Windows
Vista. Lots more new trading card content seems to have
been added since our original review and the quality
is just as high (if not higher). Enteractive is doing
a great job of maintaining and upgrading what is clearly
a fun and useful product. The cost of trading card printer
paper has come down since we last looked, so you can't
even complain about the high cost of printing. In any
event, the results are worth it. Your kids will love
you for this one. Highly recommended.
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