One of the things Macs have always excelled at is desktop publishing. Indeed, the first time I ever used a Mac was during a DTP class at University where I managed to start a magazine about darts players.
However, I wish I'd had something like Swift Publisher to help me rather than having to negotiate the complexities of Quark Xpress. Swift Publisher makes it easy enough for even a darts player to produce professional looking flyers, newsletters, brochures, letterheads and more. There are more than 1,000 images, 90 designs and 100 templates to help get you going too, so you don't have to start from scratch.
Swift Publisher allows you to produce documents where text professionally wraps around images and objects, as well as background and foreground layers to help create and edit advanced designs. You can also control transparency, tint images with colors, mask, crop, tile and rotate them. Usefully, Swift Publisher also integrates with iPhoto if you want to import images.
One problem, however, seems to be with PDF documents. For some reason, Adobe PDF Reader handles PDFs made in Swift badly and the quality can look poor. In addition, exporting them seems to considerably increase their file size, although you can reduce this by going into the Options menu in the Export dialog and tinkering around with the filters.
Overall though, Swift Publisher is a breath of fresh air compared to more complex applications such as Quark.
