Brother P-touch Editor 4+

Brother P-touch Editor Review

With years of experience behind them, and reasonably good printer and labeler interfaces in the recent past, it seems logical that an upgrade to this application would have been easy to accomplish. Instead, Brother was months late with a working application and seemed intent on re-inventing the look and feel that Mac users expect. I even thought I had to buy a new label printer in order to use it with the newest Mac OS, because they promised that the combination would work out of the box. They simply lied.

That said, it now works perfectly well, once you figure out how to do things that should be really easy - but aren't.

Mac Support is still garbage compare to Windows

The software is massively crippled compared to the windows software. It is almost a punishment to have to use this software now on a mac. Thanks Brother for purposely and continuously dropping the ball. Zero support for making your own templates. Absolutely zero support still for Datacom/electricians and such on Mac. Would be nice to have that cable lable creator or patch panel creator. YET, we still have zilch!!! Your software is the only reason we stayed, but now, it is abyssmal. Why? How hard is it to add the abilty to create custom tape templates, offer custom templates, allow us to create with better refinement using custom rulers, margins, ect... to create and distrubute our own templates to the rest of the office people to use. Yet, nothing. It is almost as if you just stopped caring about the product in general. Wanted to upgrade to PT-E550W handhelds but the Mac Editor is such garbage, we might as well pay half as much to buy the Epson or Dymo Rhino, at this point you are no better than them at twice the price. Wake up Brother!!! You loosing the industry becuase your software people are out of touch!!!!

Developer Response ,

We appreciate your feedback. We will pass your comments along to the correct department for review.

Get ready for a mediocre app experience

First, know that Brother doesn't care about Mac users. A Brother support agent freely admitted that there's no way to export a template in the app and suggested I use a Windows machine instead. So at the outset know that you're getting a crippled piece of software compared to the Windows version.

Second, the inability to export templates (and then transfer them to my PT-D610BT) is a huge pain for me personally since I was intending to use the device primarily to create QR labels "on the go." The PT-D610BT doesn't have QR templates installed by default, and without the ability to export and move them to the machine is a huge drawback to the app—albeit a subjective one.

The app does what it needs to do in terms of preparing a label, generating dynamic values from a CSV file, and sending to the printer. So that's a plus (and the reason for 3/5 stars).

Besides the glaring issues related to export/transfer mentioned above I would enjoy seeing the ability to dynamically alter an image based on a value in the dataset, and use additional fonts that aren't standard (e.g. ones purchased), but unable to transfer or get them to work.

The app works for basic label printing, but if you need anything a bit beyond that you're better off (apparently) buying a Windows PC and using the app they've built for that OS.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for taking the time to review your experience with the Brother P-touch Editor app. We appreciate your feedback. We would like to help. Please contact the Brother USA support team at www.brother-usa.com/support.