The Mac version is not available at the moment - the app itself is portable and can be built for Mac but internal image processing modules are C++ - so we have to compile them for Mac.
So could you try it under Windows - if the functionality be really helpful and interesting - we will prepare Mac version for you
Exiton, firstly thank you for freely offering your product.
I need to do further testing, however I like what I see so far and I have only played for 30 minutes or so with a simple 4C vector business card PDF! I think that there is a small core niche market that would find this very useful and a larger market that would use it far less – however they would be appreciative when they did need to use it.
Initial thoughts:
1. The installer downloads as ColorSplitter-1.1.5
.msi.exe however the double extension of
.exe appears to confuse Windows and it will not run,
removing .exe so that it simply has the
.msi extension will let the installer run.
2. In Australia we use the metric system, I don’t want to be confounded with inches as a unit of measure. How does one change the unit of measure to metric? There should be a program wide default that is remembered after being set.
3. There are no common metric sizes for business card “products” (yes, there is a product edit button to set your own sizes, which is helpful). They vary slightly between “personal standards” depending on the originator. 50x90, 55x90, 54x89, 54x88 etc.
4. Saving a small/simple vector file as composite or separated PDF file that has been processed (say 4 colour process mapped to only 2 spot colours) happens so fast that I hit the save button a second time as I thought that nothing happened, then I was presented with a message to override. So perhaps a “save completed” message to provide feedback would be nice.
EDIT: I now see that there is a status readout on the lower left, perhaps it would be better placed on the lower right so that it is more visible directly after processing using the save button.
5. The right hand side panel for Info/Composite/Separations could potentially benefit from having the preview image area be resizable smaller when needed, so that the Color List area can be expanded larger so that one does not have to scroll in the small area provided to easily see all separations. Sometimes the color list is important to view without scrolling, othertimes the preview would be more important.
6. Having the ability to zoom/pan within the preview area would be great (similar to the left hand input preview), especially once a job has been re-separated/re-mapped.
7. Depending on the target market, a 1-bit output option may also be useful… However that would then mean that you would need a halftone output feature which may be expecting too much (600, 1200, 2400 and 2540 ppi)!
8. As processing changes are applied to each page separately, it would be good to be able to copy the applied changes from a previous source page to a target page. Why manually re-do everything again if it equally applies to the p2/back of the job as well as the p1/front of the job?
9. Once changes have been applied, being able to save and reuse the settings as a “preset” would be helpful. In order to speed up work if the file was changed and required reprocessing or if this was a regular, commonly repeating/reoccurring job.
10. Crop marks generated by the program are coloured 100%CMYK (400%) rather than in registration/all colour or overprinting in 100% of the new separated spot colours.
11. Saving to raster format (TIFF 600 or 1200) with the crops checked, no crops were produced? However creating a separated PDF crops were produced.
12. You have done a great job with the auto colour separation to new colours, however it would also be useful to simply split a CMYK/Spot PDF into it’s source colour separations without changing the input values (auto creation of native/existing colour separations to separated PDF, TIFF etc).
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So, despite my list above, you have done well for a beta/gm/rc/v1.0 release!
Stephen Marsh
