Product Reviews

For Chronos, better known for its home office products such as Soho Organizer and Soho Notes, iScrapbook is a step in a new direction. The application is designed to appeal to the scrapbooking enthusiasts who increasingly find that the material they want to use as scraps is digital rather than paper.

Chronos' solution is something that deliberately (and wisely) copies the approach seen in Pages and iWeb, where you're presented with beautiful default templates into which you can pour your own imagination. To start with, there are eight templates and all of them are in a 12in-square format, the most popular among American scrapbookers. This could be a problem when the time comes to print your completed book, as not all home printers can cope with that paper size.

Disappointingly, iScrapbook's built-in Print Online function isn't a function at all: it takes you to a page on the Chronos website that helpfully tells you that there are no commercial online print services available at the moment.

Of course, you can make your own custom templates, in A4 or any other paper size you like. And building

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from scratch is dead easy, as the design-and-build interface is where iScrapbook really excels. Drag elements from the panel on the right and onto the page, and then use the simple contextual controls to edit almost any aspect of that element.

Every selected element has a small handle that provides access to all of the custom controls, and here iScrapbook innovates beyond Pages. Where you would be constantly mousing to Pages' Inspector to make changes, here they're immediately to hand, right next to the thing you want to edit. This approach makes the editing process much faster and easier on the wrist.

The controls are beautifully designed, looking almost as smart as the scrapbooks. They even slide gracefully to one side if there's not enough screen space for them to open downwards.

The application comes with a decent collection of elements, clip art and stock photography, and there's easy access to your own iPhoto library via the Photos tab of the elements panel. With such a wide variety of things to choose from, you could easily get lost, so there's also a Favorites panel where you can drop the stuff you're likely to use frequently.

Organising everything is straightforward, with a library of scrapbooks to the left of the work space. This is where you can switch between projects, move pages around and get a visual overview of your work so far.

A lot of thought has gone into iScrapbook, and its ease of use will appeal to serious scrapbookers and newbies alike. Users will be able to share their custom designs online at iscrapbookworld.com, which is just as well, as the limited choice of default templates is the only thing that lets this product down.