MWNY: Fax solution built natively for Mac OS X

The Macintosh Division of Smith Micro Software, a developer and marketer of communication software products, is showing FAXstf X, a complete fax solution built natively for Mac OS X, at this week’s Macworld New York.

As you might expect, FAXstf X allows faxes to be sent and received from any Mac document application. Plus, it takes advantage of the AddressBook within Mac OS X, making it unnecessary to duplicate or maintain multiple phonebooks. You can just drag and drop from the AddressBook into FAXstf X’s FaxBrowser to send a fax.

“We are very excited about offering our full-featured fax software exclusively on Mac OS X,” said William Smith Jr., president and CEO of Smith Micro, in a statement. “We believe FAXstf X is a powerful, easy-to-use solution and users will appreciate its seamless operation that enables ultra-fast faxing of virtually any document.”

As a native Mac OS X application, FAXstf X supports multi-threading to allow users to send faxes in the background while performing another task. In addition, FAXstf has taken full advantage of Mac OS X’s Aqua user interface and features animated icons to reflect the status of a fax that’s being sent or received, Smith said. FAXstf X also supports AppleScript for users to automate repetitive fax tasks. Plus, it offers third party developers an easy way to integrate faxing function in their Mac OS X applications, Smith said.

He added that FAXstf X provides advanced features you won’t find on any fax machine, such as sending a fax to multiple recipients; create AddressBook entries for different fax groups; edit and make notation on a received fax and then resend; page jumping to quickly go to any page in a document; and view faxes at any size up to 500 percent. And there’s a FaxBrowser that lets users view and manage their faxes from one location.

System requirements for FAXstf X include Mac OS X and 30MB of RAM. It will begin shipping in the third quarter with a suggested retail price of US$59.95.