By Dennis Sellers of MacsimumPerspective

"Chronos’ SOHO Business Cards, the company’s Mac OS X software for producing business cards, is a reasonably priced (US$29.95), time-saving product that anyone who operates a small business should own. It’s what I use to produce my Macsimum calling cards.

SOHO Business Cards comes with good-looking, ready-to-use designs, 50 Bitstream fonts in PostScript formats and over 700 supported card stocks from companies such as Avery, PaperDirect, Idea Art, etc. There are designs especially … well, designed for over 400 professions, including accountant, bookkeeper, dentist, doctor, farmer and many more. You can design your business cards in horizontal, double-side, vertical, folding, even CD formats.

SOHO Business Cards’ design and typography tools are easy to use. The software offers plenty of flexibility and creative options with over 100 masks for creating special effects on images and shapes. There are also 13,000-plus photos and vector clip art pieces; they’re high quality for the most part. The icing on the cake is that SOHO Business Cards integrates with the Mac OS X Address Book and also lets you access iPhoto albums and photos directly from the Clip Art Drawer.

The interface is slightly confusing when it comes time to change layouts or tweak your fonts. And a leading control would also be nice.

But this is a great tool for creating gorgeous business cards. Come to Macworld San Francisco in January and I’ll give you my card to show you what SOHO can do. Chronos also makes SOHO Labels & Envelopes, which I’ll be reviewing later. A 30-day demo version of both SOHO products is available at Chronos’ Web site.

Minimum system requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or higher (10.3 is needed to use vector clip art), a Power Mac G3 or higher, 30MB of available disk space and an inkjet printer.

Macsimum rating: 9 out of 10"