Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Quark: Mac OS X Not Ready

Posted by pudge on from the printing-is-so-1990s dept.

blankmange writes "NewsFactor reports that Quark's QuarkXPress is not quite up-to-snuff under Mac OS X." Sources in the article claim Mac OS X still isn't quite there in regard to printing, or predictability. That is, I suppose, you don't mind crashes as long as you know when they are going to happen and what is going to cause them.

4 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Quark is too complacent by Spencerian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Quark has milked its dominance in DTP for too long. Adobe tends to get its products polished by version 3, and its InDesign 2 product has received very positive reviews over QXP 5. The fact that QXP isn't supported natively in OS X is a nail in Quark's complacency coffin.

    I'm not a big fan of QXP due to its history of annoying and serious bugs that caused all manner of stability and reliability problems. I do wish them success, but unfortunately they either have a lot of legacy issues or they really think that other companies won't be a problem while they take their sweet time to port. OS X's printing isn't perfect, but the fundamental PS support is there and works well enough, so that's a poor excuse.

    Ask Lotus (1-2-3) about the consequences of complacency in the marketplace. Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.

    --
    Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
  2. Sounds to me like... by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds to me like they're making excuses while everybody else seems to be having no trouble making their products work under MacOS X.

  3. Does this mean they need to add more bugs by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Funny
    NewsFactor reports that Quark's QuarkXPress is not quite up-to-snuff under Mac OS X." Sources in the article claim Mac OS X still isn't quite there in regard to printing, or predictability. That is, I suppose, you don't mind crashes as long as you know when they are going to happen and what is going to cause them.

    I'm having trouble parsing that last sentence. The only interpretation I can think of that (roughly) fits with the grammer and my understanding of the world is that Quark users will be disapointed under Mac OS X, since they are used to having their systems crash and knowing that Quark caused it, and now when their system crashes they won't know for sure if Quark caused it.

    If that's the case, I can fix the problem easily. Just print out this post and patse the following line somewhere where you can refer to it often:

    Trust me, it was Quark.

    You're welcome.

    -- MarkusQ

  4. Yup, sounds like Quark. Remeber floppies? by realgone · · Score: 4, Interesting
    They've got a history of being slow with this sort of thing. Anyone else remember the exquisite agonies of their software installation system?

    Not too long ago, you needed both a floppy drive and a CD to install XPress 3.31(?) on your box. The CD contained all the app data, the floppy held the serialization info. (And there was yet another floppy for registration. You'd mail that disk directly to Quark after you were done.) Annoying, but you could live with it. But when Apple decided to go no-floppy across their entire product line -- ouch! Suddenly no one could install Quark on those beyoootiful new G3s for which they'd shelled out so much money. (Or at least not without buying some USB external floppy drives, which were hard-to-find early on.) And for months afterwards, Quark did next to nothing about this very obvious problem.

    IIRC, they eventually settled it so you could send them a proof-of-purchase, your original program disks and a vial of blood harvested from a virgin under the full moon's light and get a CD-only version of the installer. But back at the time, it was a HUGE issue for a lot of bureaus and design shops.