Barcode and Label Design Software, BarTender by Seagull Scientific is 30 Years Old

BarTender is our favourite label design software package.  Not only is the software powerful and reliable, the support we get from the software developers, Seagull Scientific, is quick and knowledgeable. As it’s 30 years old this year, I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate BarTender’s birthday with some birthday presents.

BarTender first appeared thirty years ago in 1987 as BarTender for DOS (if you remember what DOS was), making it probably the oldest, most stable label design program.  in 1987 Seagull Scientific were making barcode scanners and their barcode design software was a sideline.  In 1993 they launched a Windows version of their label design software and saw, for the first time, that year BarTender sales overtook hardware sales, prompting them to concentrate solely on label design software.

In 1994 Seagull developed windows printer drivers for thermal label printers, and to this day, have been the best alternative (perhaps a better alternative) to the printer manufacturers’ own drivers.

1999 saw Seagull Scientific become an international company, opening a European office – followed by a Taipei office covering Asia Pacific and another in Tokyo.  Another step into the big leagues was establishing a relationship first with Oracle then with SAP – and enabling their top end label edition to work with enterprise level ERP software.

Over the thirty years BarTender has been in development it’s seen 11 major revisions – adding the ability to print onto RFID labels, the addition of ID card printing and a host of incremental improvements for ease of use and stability.  Over the years it’s won numerous awards from various industry groups and associations.

12 Reasons Why You’d Want to Look at BarTender

I’ve chosen just ten features from the hundreds that make BarTender so powerful.  BarTender comes in four editions – Basic, Professional, Automation and Enterprise Automation.  Whilst you can use all of these features with the trial version of the software, not all editions enable all these features.  Talk to us about what you’re wanting to achieve.

1. Connect your databases and spreadsheets directly to your labels – no need to key in product details into your labels.  Simply link your label to the database and select the products you want to print.
2. Use a data entry form to simplify label printing.  Design a form, fill in the fields and print your labels.  Users won’t need to delve into label designs in order to print.
3. Password protect your label designs.  Operators can still print, but they can’t accidentally change your carefully created label formats.
4. Keep track of who’s printed what labels with the detailed usage history.
5. Print directly from your iPhone, iPad or Android device with the BarTender Print Portal app.
6. Automate your label printing – automatically print address labels in response to customer orders arriving on your website.
7. Print from the cloud – use a web portal to print your labels.
8. Print ID cards and RFID embedded labels – use BarTender with your ID Card printer or Radio Frequency ID enabled printer.
9. Design labels quickly and easily – use the alignment tool to align text, or group objects together so you can move them around your label, rotate images, text and barcodes… I could continue.
10. Print onto round, oval or rectangular labels.
11. Reduce the number of label templates your organisation uses – massively. Using BarTender’s Intelligent Templates, large users of labels can organise their templates and reduce the number of templates used.
12. Integrate with ERP systems – BarTender has direct support for corporate ERP systems including SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere with BarTender’s easy to use Integration builder.

BarTender Birthday Presents

As with any birthday – let’s talk birthday presents.

We’ve got some useful presents to give away: 8GB USB memory sticks and Power Banks to give your flagging smartphone battery a new lease of life.

We’ll be giving these away to the first four readers from the UK who test for themselves the latest version of BarTender.

All you have to do is download a 30 day trial of BarTender and email me to let me know what you thought to it.  Download the 64 bit and 32 bit versions by clicking here.

Sorry but we’re only giving these gifts to UK based readers.