Swift Publisher Review and Giveaway
Swift Publisher is a desktop publisher for the Mac that is much more than just a word processor. If you’re a Pages user, I think you will really feel at home with Swift Publisher. If you’re a beginner, you will definitely appreciate the 130 templates for use in a wide variety of document types from flyers letterheads, brochures, newsletters, catalogs and more. The developers of Swift Publisher promise that you don’t need to pay a few hundred dollars to get a top of the line design for your document, in fact you can get something even better for only $49.95 (or for free in this giveaway!).
Let’s take a quick look at Swift Publisher and at the end of the review you’ll all have a chance to win 1 of 3 licensed copies from the generous folks at Belightsoft.
Swift Publisher starts out like most desktop publishing apps and asks you to select a document type or allows you to begin with a blank page. The program ships with 130 really polished themes so you should have no problems finding something suitable for your project. The publishing process is handled by a 2 layer system, which I found to be really powerful. Items or elements that you want to appear on every page are put in the background tab, while things like text and images that are page specific go into the foreground. Creating a Master Page will make the same backround appear on every page of the document, while things like text and images that are page specific can be added to foreground. Once you master this method wrapping text around images and keeping your documents looking consistent is really a piece of cake.
Images are great, they can really spruce up pretty much any document, and Swift Publisher has over 23,000 of them. To add a personal feel to the images there is over 100 masks to apply, which can help make them fit in to the over 130 themes. 
And they don’t just stop at masks or borders, for example, you can alter tint, control the transparency, hue and much more. If the 23,000 royalty free graphics aren’t enough or you need something you’ve taken yourself, the iPhoto integration comes in handy. As great as it integrates with iPhoto it also has the ability to use Art Text power for creating anything from web banners to web 2.0 style buttons (You must own Art Text, however, Art Text Limited edition is built right into Swift Publisher for free). Another great feature is the ability to search Google Images from right within the app to grab the image you need.
If you want something looking top-quality, you may not have to go out and buy an expensive application like InDesign or Quark XPress because honestly, Swift Publisher can give you much better results without spending hours learning how to use it. Not only is it easy and fun to use, it’s affordable. At $49.95 anyone can benefit from the power and simplicity here and end up with documents that look stunning. Swift Publisher is loaded with hundreds of features which in my opinion make it more powerful than Apple’s Pages to create professional layouts that are sure to impress anyone.
Belight Software, the developers of Swift Publisher have kindly offered us 3 licenses to giveaway to our readers exclusively at MacApper. In order to enter this giveaway simply comment on this post with a suggestion of a feature that you would like to see in Swift Publisher.
The contest will end at midnight EST on December 28th, with the winner announced shortly after that date. Good luck to all and be sure to subscribe to MacApper’s RSS Feed for more amazing giveaways!
Not a suggestion or feature, but with 23000 royalty free images (clip-art) how much h.d space does the app take up?
Anyway, a feature I’d like to see is the ability to create a third tab (a middle) which isn’t activated on every page, but can be easily switched on to make creating multiple pages with the same content (but stuff you don’t want on every page)
Maybe that’s a rubbish idea! Oh well…
Whoops! Forgot to say that I know copy & paste can do the same thing, but this would be able to be used with multiple items. I suppose it’s a bit like a clipboard, but the content is formatted for the page already.
Sorry about the double post.
Wouldn’t it be great if Swift Publisher could use iWork templates?
A button to publish to dot.mac account.
Hi!
Support for layers will be welcom in Swift Publisher. You can add more effects, maybe some 3D.
Merry Christmas for everybody! Best regards!
HTML export would be cool.
I’d love to see .DOC or .DOCX and InDesign and Illustrator (.AI and .EPS) import/export capabilities (I have a huge vector library and I always need to open Illustrator to export vector to jpeg in order to use it in Pages or Word).
A clipboard manager would be very useful as well.
One awesome program. I have used it for almost a year now. One of the best features is that they respond to your problems and even will go out of there way to help you get through technical struggles.
I would love to see it take a step further and adde the ability to publish web pages as the documents I am making would look great on the web. Let us add HTML Links and such so we can build web pages with it. FreewayPro is a similar WYSIWYG HTML editor, perhaps you could take some cues from them as I hear they produce very clean HTML code. Or perhaps this could be an add-on or an additional program that spawns out of Swift Publisher.
I’d like a pro-active help system that jumps in if it senses the user doing something wrong over and over.
Nice addition will be:
1. Formating toolbar like in iWork ‘08
2. Copy/paste object style
3. When I drag and drop new image to selected image in template
it replace old image exactly as it was with the same place and dimentions.
4. Object masking can be improved
5. Table formating is very limited right now
Being an academic, I’d like to see some features that would allow me to interact easily with my classes workflow. Many times my needs on publishing files are not on paper, but on web… I put pdfs online that my students or colleagues can download either to print or to see on a pdf reader (preview, adobe reader, skim, browser…). Therefore, I’d like to see Swift Publisher support:
1) FTP (STFP,…) publishing
2) Text and images hyperlinks (that can be retained on, at least, PDF export)
3) Presentation capacities (or at least export to Keynotes and eventually PowerPoint)
it would be nice to publish to swf, pdf is nice and all but being able to embed into web would be nice.
I’d like to see a built-in feature where you can take a document you create in Swift Publisher and export it to Leopard’s Mail stationery.
Editing PDFs would be cool.
I didn’t see anything about import from MS Office or iWork…that would be great too!
Swift publisher is great software. I recommend the following features:
1. real time dimensioning
2. auto-scrolling
3. text style management: to update all texts with a certain style while editing the style.
4. An easier way to hide either the Foreground or Background layer so you can bypass the preferences setting
How about direct connectivity to print shops for printing, like Kinkos.
I am not a fan of disconnected palettes. Maybe they could have an option for one window or floating palettes.
I really dislike the seperate font panel all the OSX now seems to use. It wastes screen space. I would like to see Swift Publisher go back to just a simple list of fonts from a font menu!
I would love to see the option to print spread pages, like indesign CS2 or CS3. That’s the only reason I use those beasts!.
Happy holidays!
As a user of Swift Publisher since version 1, I agree with the review as far as it goes. While it is no Pagemaker, InDesign, or Quark, it really is great for small projects turned out quickly with good design. A wide screen or dual screen setup works best so you can move the palettes away from your canvas area.
- SWF export for web (must have in 2008 I think!)
- Hyperlinks
I forgot to mention there is a opensource soultion for PDF to SWF conversion, so introducing feature I mentioned above, should be quick and painless.
I am already using it, but it would be nice to have such thing integrated:
http://www.swftools.org/ (pdf2swf tool)
I’d love to see a business card template added to this. Or perhaps a music program template.
editing PDFs would be great!!!
I use the Belight Business Card Composer, and it is fantastic. I anticipate this program is every bit as easy to use, and produces professional results
Document export to Mail as stationary would be awesome.
Perhaps this would encourage more switchers. How about some support for importing MS Publisher files?
Feature suggestion: export to web
Bi-directional compatibility with MS Word is essential for communicating with the rest of the world. I realize that Word does not have the formatting capabilities of Swift, but, whatever editable facsimile available would be essential to interacting with the corporate world. Absent this feature, the product becomes an island of automation, producing data that does not have the ability to be shared easily with others.
However, that approach is a best practice, as almost every Microsoft product stores data in a proprietary format. I guess they can get away with it, being the 800 lb gorilla.
search free and paid stock photography sites from within app.
I’ve tried the trial and I think there could be a lot more clip art and professional images. Otherwise its a good program
I know, there are masks in SwiftPublisher, but I realy miss a real gradient tool to do that. On the other hand, this program just rocks, very nicely done…
How about the ability to open/save to Microsoft Publisher. Seems to be something windows people cling to… feeling like there is no way to take their layout work with them. Lot’s of churches use publisher for the Sunday morning bulletin and Church newsletters. It would be nice to plant a Mac in this situation using Swift Publisher.
dotmac-integration with one-click-publishing just like iWeb. This way, I wouldn´t need to create flyers in one application, announcement websites in another app.
A simple export to mail, or mail templates would be awesome. A possible database feature (mail merge) would be an ace idea to. It would allow you to send out e-letters to your customers saving you money on postage.
The UI may need some tweaking to make it more Leopard like.
Templates for designing cd covers for custom playlists would be really nice, aswell as being able to open/edit/save .pub files.
I would like to see more integration with the several formats that documents could use. I would also like to see more templates you can never have enough.
I would like to see integration with Keynote for making outlines.
[I've only just started playing with this tonight, so it might well be a feature already.]
Anyway the feature I’m currently looking for is the ability to save a ‘text-dodge’/'text-mask’ (i.e. to make text flow around the subject of a background image).
But to save it independently – so I can use the same mask with loads of different pictures (- that are specifically 3d rendered to have the subject in the same exact place!), each one is the illustration to a different page. (and same position on page).
I’d like to see the ability to import/read PageMaker 6.5 files.
How about some basic image editing tools?
Improvements/suggestions: 1. Fix the memory leaks and random crashes – it happens WAY too often. 2. integrate Core image tools. 3. integrate with for-purchase stock image websites like istockphoto. 4. link embedded images and data to originating files (simple cataloging updates).
Impressions: Wife and I have been using for well over a year now. Good stuff when compared to pricey and overstuffed alternatives. Published a K-12 yearbook with it last year. Have only demoed Pages, so no real opinion on how it compares. Foreground/Background scheme works well once you understand it and use effectively. A third layer would be nice.
When we can expect winners to be announced?
I had this app at my last job, but when I left I didn’t buy it for home until the mubundle before Christmas. I’ve been using pages, but since getting this again, have used it for anything new. Support for .doc would be great, then it could be my word processor for anything beyond text edit, but as a page layout it’s great!
[...] to get the winners announced but better late than never. Earlier this month a giveaway was held for Swift Publisher, which is a really useful and beginner friendly desktop publishing app for the Mac that is much [...]
Well Swift is great but there is little chance to modify or to compose images from scratch or combining letters and images. This could be great but is still a good app.
I now know how to trade currencies. Thanks
I am bilingual (English-Finnish). It would help me and probably others if it were possible to use more than one language with Swift Publisher. My sister did a Christmas calendar this year with another software package, and she could put English and Finnish text in it.
I switched from PC to Mac in Oct ‘08. My only problem has been a replacement for MS Publisher. InDesign is too expensive and too complicated. I was hoping Swift Publisher would do the trick. The price is great (!) but features fall far short of MS Publisher.
Also, there aren’t enough ready-to-go templates.
Otherwise, this is a great program, especially for the $$!
That is why we aimed at changing some of those unsuccessful institutional practices to include service-learning projects into the regular curricu- lum. ,
Nick patches things up with his daughter when his suspicions are confirmed. ,
I would like to see page tiling added to Swift Publisher so that I can print large documents on standard size paper.