As part of creating my own scrapbooking application, I have been researching the competition. I need to know: How do competing apps work? Are they any good? What features do they do well/poorly? Is there anything I can do better or differently? Or, heaven forbid, do they render my app idea irrelevant by doing it better than I could?
One of the first applications I investigated was iScrapbook, a Mac-only program from Chronos, purchased through the Mac App Store. Recently updated to version 4, this is a very solid application with a lot of good reviews behind it, so was a natural for me to check out. The application downloads with a few free scrapbooking kits, and a generous number of additional free kits that can be downloaded from the Chronos website. Free stuff? That sounds good to me – let’s go!
So I open iScrapbook and..oops, first thing it does is crash! That’s not a good beginning. One point off. Finally opened, the user is presented with a Chronos website registration window. What do I need to register for? Well, no reason really, except that Chronos wants to collect your email to send you stuff. Another point off for iScrapbook. Next up is a video tutorial window. A male voice, for an audience that is likely to be 95% women? Seems like an odd choice, but I’ll let it go. I don’t normally watch tutorial videos, on the theory that if your software is so complicated that one is required, you should re-think your interface, but I watched this one for the research value. Thankfully it was brief, and better yet it appeared to be unnecessary since the software looked to be fairly intuitive.
The video dismissed, an eager scrapbooker starts by choosing a page size and type; that is, a 12’ by 12’ blank page, double page, or a pre-designed template. Oddly, 12’ by 12’ is the only size choice for a page, and while it is a very popular size, it would be nice to offer 8 1/2’ by 11’ pages, the paper size that fits into most printers. The regular pre-designed templates don’t interest me much, since they are just already-decorated pages with spaces for your photos, with all the color choices and patterns chosen for you. The smart templates, on the other hand, are more interesting, because despite the fact that the photo layouts are preset, you can still play with the colors of background papers in a creative way. Let’s try one of those.
First thing to do is place my photos, which works very easily by drag-and-drop from the right sidebar. iScrapbook integrates well with iPhoto and Aperture, both very popular photo management programs with Mac users. My only complaint here is that the thumbnails can be a little hard to see, so it’s difficult to know which photo you are dragging in – is that the good picture of Aunt Harriet or is that the one with lettuce in her teeth? The thumbnails can be enlarged, but at the expense of seeing a lot of the photos in one view, which is a problem if the folder you are working out has a large number of pictures. Since it’s easy to delete photos from the page if you get the wrong one, it’s not a major issue, but it’s a challenge nonetheless.
That done, I decided to add a little color to my template in the form of some background papers. Then came the next challenge: all my previously-downloaded iScrapbook kits from version 3 somehow failed to migrate to version 4. What’s up with that? It took a long time to download and import them the first time and I didn’t want to do it again. The Chronos support site lists a procedure for migrating the old kits, but the process was a little too complicated for the unsophisticated user and more trouble than I wanted to go through myself. As it turned out, the difficulty of the method was moot, since the procedure was wrong, directing the user to find folders that do not exist. I sent a help message to Chronos Support, and promptly received an answer that I didn’t need to migrate kits to version 4, since it happened automatically. Yes, but what if it doesn’t? I won’t go into details, but I finally figured it out on my own, no thanks to Chronos Support, and got all my free kits (more than forty of them) imported.
The importing of my kits took longer than I would have liked, interrupting the flow of my work, but at last I was ready to add a little background color. Like with my photos, it was a simple matter of dragging-and-dropping each paper into place and letting the smart template take care of the details. There was really nothing to it, and the process allowed me to focus more on getting the appropriate mix of colors rather than their arrangement. Adding text was more challenging and the program became a little sluggish when I attempted it, but that may be because the fonts needed to load. There are over 1700 different fonts in the app, enough to keep most people happy for a long time.
Here’s the result of my effort with the smart template:
Next, I got creative with a blank template. I wanted a “vacation” or “Hawaii” themed kit and don’t have one, so I decided to go shopping in the iScrapbook store. Maybe I’m dense, but I found it a little difficult to find new kits, since there’s nothing about the store in the help menu and no store built into the application. Instead, you have to leave the application and go online to the iScrapbook Store website, which is oddly difficult to reach from the Chronos website (clicking a link entitled “iScrapbook.com Store” fails to bring you there, for example). Don’t they want my money?
I did finally figure out the kit store, but the process certainly could have been easier. After navigating to the online kit store at iScrapbook.com, you buy your kit (in a relatively painless process), click each link separately to download the kits if you are buying more than one, find them on your computer in your Downloads folder, double-click to unzip them, then manually import them into the app from the File menu in iScrapbook – a cumbersome process. Why not have it all occur within the app? The kits are in a proprietary format anyways, and can’t be used outside of the app, so it would make sense.
In any case, once I had the kits I wanted, I made use of what I consider to be iScrapbook’s greatest feature, the ability to search in your collection of kits. As you may know if you’ve done much digital scrapbooking, finding what you’re looking for when you’ve got a lot of kits is a challenge at best, and potentially a frustrating turn-off. A search function could potentially eliminate this problem. Since I was creating pages of my recent trip to Kauai, I searched “vacation” in the “Papers” category, just to see what would come up. Remarkably, it came up with a couple of choices! Pretty good ones too, so I searched for a color I wanted, and found that too. This was fun! In short order I had the page you see below:
Overall, iScrapbook worked quite well. First time through it took a little time before I could actually start scrapbooking, what with importing and all, but the program looks good, is intuitive, and fun to use. It was easy to resize objects as needed, move objects forward and back in the layers, and add text and elements. Some commands are a little obscure (does anybody really know what kerning is?), but mostly they are clear and easy to use. There are downsides, of course. I would like an eyedropper function combined with the search to select colors that match papers and elements, because it is frequently hard to verbalize exactly what color you are looking for. The inability to choose any paper size other than 12’ by 12’ is a little puzzling too, given that people may want other sizes.
Other downsides:
- Being tied to their ecosystem of kits, you can’t import other kits you may have independently purchased.
- The app could be even easier to use for unsophisticated users (think, your grandmother).
- An iOS or Android version doesn’t exist, so can’t scrapbook on tablets.
- Not cloud based.
- Can’t add your own tags to elements.
Despite the downsides, I enjoyed using iScrapbook. Check it out if you’re interested in a solid scrapbooking application for a Mac.