Park City, Utah - May 17, 2004—Chronos LC today announced the release of SOHO Business Cards version 1.0, the fastest and easiest way to create stunning business cards on Mac OS X. SOHO Business Cards is the first in a series of Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) products Chronos will be releasing this year--more details to follow soon.

SAVE TIME. SAVE MONEY. BUILD BRAND.

First impressions are important and business cards are often the first promotional material a person receives from a company. SOHO Business Cards provides time-saving precision tools and professional ready-made designs to ensure that a great first impression is conveyed every time. SOHO Business Cards is targeted towards small businesses, self-employed individuals and human resource departments.

SOHO Business Cards lets users print business cards in quantities that fit their needs and eliminate costly reprints when contact information changes, the company relocates or the company identity is "refreshed". Plus, businesses can avoid the cost of an expensive designer while at the same time building brand by creating a strong and consistent identity for the entire company.

COMPLETE BUSINESS CARD KIT

SOHO Business Cards is a complete business card kit and includes everything the user needs to design and print impressive business cards. It comes with 13,000+ designer-quality photographs, photos of objects and vector clip art images. This high-quality collection sports high resolution (300 dpi) photos, scalable EPS vector clip art and photos of objects that are pre-masked for transparency around the object. The entire graphics collection can be filtered by category and searched by keyword to find the perfect image. It also ships with 50 Bitstream® commercial-grade fonts so users can obtain the perfect look for their branding.

SOHO Business Cards ships with 3,000+ ready-made designs including those with photos and artwork right up to the edge of the card (full bleed). Users may customize a ready-made design for a designer look or create their own. Designs are included for over 400 unique professions to help users find a design and style specific to their work.

SOHO Business Cards is compatible with over 700 popular cards stocks including virtually all business card stocks from Avery®, PaperDirect®, Idea Art and more. A wide variety of business card formats are supported including horizontal, vertical, double-sided, folding and CD card formats.

Users may print their business card designs on virtually any inkjet, laser or color laser printer. Alternatively, users may submit their design to an online commercial print shop via SOHO Business Cards and have their cards delivered right to their door.

POWERFUL DESIGN TOOLS

An unprecedented suite of tools is included to help users create one-of-a-kind business card designs. Simple, one-step tools let users quickly draw shapes, add graphics, arrange and align objects, rotate objects and add designer special effects. There are more than 30 shapes with individual controls to help users create logos and custom design elements. Built-in rulers, project grid lines, snap-to-grid, real-time alignment guides and full zoom capabilities make positioning objects a breeze.

SOHO Business Cards comes with an array of special effects once reserved for graphic artists. Some of the more familiar effects include shadows, transparency and linear and circular gradients. Plus, users can easily create more advanced special effects like tinting an image with any color to any degree, clipping an image to any shape and filling text with any image. The software ships with 100+ image masks which can be used on both shapes and images to create fades, soften edges, add texture, etc.

SOHO Business Cards can import logos, photos and clip art in popular formats. A built-in Scrapbook lets users store favorite graphics, shapes, and text for quick and easy future reuse. The Scrapbook even remembers any special formatting or attributes applied to an object such as font, stroke color, transparency, masks, etc.

SOHO Business Cards incorporates two precision printing tools for exact results. First, a simple and unique printer calibration feature ensures perfect card stock alignment. Second, optional crop marks can be added to assist commercial printers in making precise cuts for regular and full bleed designs.

INTEGRATION

Use over 150 smart-fields to automatically place information from the Mac OS X Address Book directly on business cards. Smart-fields take care of the details like name, address and phone number formatting so information doesn't have to be entered a certain way in advance. Plus, there are smart-fields for almost everything including logos, initials, one-line addresses and more. Eight powerful text fitting options can automatically shrink or expand text as necessary or modify letter spacing for full justification effects.

Built-in Profiles work in conjunction with the Address Book so users can use a single design for their entire company or for multiple roles they might have. This time-saving feature is also useful for handing out modified business cards at trade shows or other events to limit information exchange or to use a different e-mail address to control spam.

Pictures and albums from iPhoto are automatically loaded and accessible from the built-in Clip Art Drawer so users can simply drag a photo right onto their business card. The Clip Art Drawer is designed to be very fast and is capable of scrolling through tens of thousands of images in seconds.

AVAILABILITY & REQUIREMENTS

Chronos believes users should have the opportunity to try the software for free before they purchase. A fully functional 30 day trial version can be downloaded from Chronos' web site at <www.chronosnet.com>. SOHO Business Cards has been attractively priced at $29.99 and is available directly from Chronos. It will also be available soon at major retailers.

SOHO Business Cards requires Mac OS X v10.2 or later (v10.3 or later required to use vector clip art); 30MB of available disk space (1.2GB for full clip art collection); CD-ROM drive (software comes on multi-CD set); inkjet or laser printer optional (great results from popular inkjet, laser, color laser printers including HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark, et cetera).

COMPANY INFORMATION

Chronos has been developing award-winning Macintosh software since 1993 and is based in Park City, Utah, home of the 2002 Winter Games.

PR CONTACT

marketing@chronosnet.com