FreeCard Freeware E-card Creator

FreeCard is a neat little Freeware e-card creator by PC WholeWare of Lexington, MA. It lets you create multimedia greeting cards that play graphics or video, music, digitized sound, and display text messages. It takes standard Windows bitmap (.BMP), video (.AVI), MIDI music (.MID), WAVE sound (.WAV) files and creates e-cards into self-contained, standalone Windows executable (.EXE) files to run on any Windows 3.1, 95/98, or NT systems.

You can save your e-cards in diskettes or send them with e-mail to friends or family. E-cards created with FreeCard are powered by the "SLIM SHOW" multimedia runtime engine. They are very compact (final e-card size starts at about 70 KB), easy to use, and require minimal hardware resources.

Create a new folder under Program Files named Free Card. Move the downloaded zip file frc201.zip into the new folder. Use WinZip or your favorite extraction utility to extract the zip file. (Windows XP: right-click on the zip file name and select Extract All.. in the popup menu that appears). In the extracted files, locate and double-click on the file setup.exe.

Note: Freecard includes an Uninstall utility.

Use the buttons near the bottom of the applications window to choose an image file and a music or sound file for your e-greeting. You can use your own images, but they must be in the Windows .bmp file format. In the drop-down list choose an effect; Fade In, barn Door, and Verical Blind are available.

Type your text message in the right side of the applications window. Unfortunately FreeCard does not allow you to choose a font. One advantage to using your own image is that you can add text in your chosen font to the image.

When you have completed your design, click on the [Send] button. To make a Windows executable, make sure the Make e-card into EXE file only radio button is set. The e-card will be saved in the applications card subfolder. You can rename the e-cards executable if you prefer (but keep the .exe file extension).

From the readme.txt file: "You are free to use the software supplied in this package to produce e-cards, and to make royalty-free distribution of the created e-cards for personal use ... You may freely reproduce and distribute unlimited copies of this software package; provided that all the files in the original package are stayed together and not changed." From the FILE_ID.DIZ file: "Free to use & distribute."