Blurb

I just discovered Blurb and I’m thrilled about trying it out. As someone who’s experimented with online printing services like Qoop, I think I’m going to like Blurb.

FEEDBACK:
(as I go through their client software (“BookSmart”) I’m going to post feedback that I have, as I have it)

– There’s a part of the wizard where it asks me to choose a theme/style. And it shows me these thumbnails… I want to be able to zoom in and see these styles up close and in detail.
– More style options wouldn’t hurt.
– The open file dialogs are custom-built, not the standard windows ones… so they don’t behave in standard ways. Like I’m looking at a list of photos in a particular folder and I want to sort them by date. It won’t let me do that (though the view I’m using does look just like the ‘detail’ view of the standard windows dialog)
– At a high level, I like the interface of the application once you get out of the wizard… the zoom is nice and fast, moving between pages is fast, the quality of the previews/wysiwyg is nice
– The autoflow feature (where you point it at a bunch of your photographs and it creates a layout for you) is ‘a few croutons short of a salad’. It incorrectly cropped a lot of my photographs (and I’m not sure how easy it would be to be more intelligent about cropping, I’d assume it’s not easy) and it when you go to change layouts, it could smarter. For example, I switched to a 4 photo layout on a page that it automatically chose a 9 photo layout for. Rather than “reflowing” the 5 photographs that got left out in my switch from 9 to 4, it just dropped those 5 photos. And what’s worse, when I reverted back to the 9 photo layout, I had lost those 5 photographs that were left out in the switch altogether (ie I had a layout with 9 spots of which only 4 had photographs in them).