Goodbye To Apple iCards? Say ‘Ugh’ To Postcard

Apple’s transition from .Mac, a melange of sporadic services, to MobileMe begot a few casualties. My often used iCards bit the dust, bought the farm, took a walk in cement overshoes.

iCards was a good way to see free email post cards to friends and loved ones. It was easy. It was free. It’s gone forever. Or is it. Despite PostCard’s best efforts, iCards is missed.

Once every couple of weeks I would click over to iCards in Safari, grab a cute or appropriate post card, add a cute line or two, and click to send it to my wife in her office.

It was fun. It was easy. It was free. And I always scored a few brownie points for being a sensitive guy. Being sensitive ended when Apple ended the life of iCards in favor of the mess that became MobileMe.

No more iCards? What’s a sensitive guy to do?

I could have looked around for a different online email postcard system, but I didn’t. Guilt? Lazy? Whatever it was it didn’t have a sufficient call to action for me to act.

This week I received an email message from a reader of my NoodleMac site who suggested I use PostCard, a Mac utility which creates personalized post cards in the iCards tradition.

PostCard is an ancient Mac OS X utility written in Cocoa. Drag and drop your photo or image, then type in whatever you want to say. Just like iCards, right? Not so fast.

The post card creation needs to be copied to your Mac’s clipboard, then pasted into your email message. There’s a built in Stamp Library so you can vary the look of the post card.

A slider lets you adjust the post card’s photo size. You can even change fonts and colors, or grab a photo from your iSight camera.

I downloaded PostCard and gave it a try. When I double clicked PostCard it informed me that a newer version was available, and gave me a link to download the update. The link was to a page without a download link. Sigh.

PostCard is showing its age. Five years without a significant update is an eternity to two in computer software years. Though PostCard claims to be shareware, it’s really crippled commercial ware.

You have to pay the license fee to remove the unlicensed watermark from your photo. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a modest fee except that I get the feeling that PostCard is not being actively developed, and the whole copy, open New Message in Mail, paste, send routine seems, uh, less than easy, simple, elegant.

That said, I still want a nifty Mac utility which creates classy looking postcards from whatever photo source and will easily email them to my loved ones (now going without my email love for a few months, since MobileMe).

I could use an online post card service. There are plenty of free ones around, but I really liked the elegant simplicity of Apple’s iCards. PostCard has the right idea but hasn’t moved far enough into the 21st century.

What about using Mail in OS X and dropping in photos, or use the Mail templates? Nope. Yes, it works, but too many steps.

So, my question of the day is,“ If you send email post cards, what do you use?”

Do you have a specific tool, or use an online service to send post cards? Share your experience in the Comments section below.