Apple Bundles InDesign With Power Macs

analog_line writes "Apple is firing a shot across the bow of Quark with a new promotion bundling Adobe InDesign 2.0 with every new PowerMac G4 (that is, the towers). News.com has a story on this as well. I say go Apple. Hopefully this will either get Quark to release their Mac OS X version of XPress or start the process of killing them off once and for all." I really liked QuarkXPress a lot when I used it extensively back in the version 3 days. It'd be a shame if it they lose out on Apple's new platform. But as a capitalist, I say, let the best product win!

Comments

best product win?

[dunkelfalke]

shouldn't it be: as a capitalist, I say, let the product with the best advertising win.

Re:Capitalist?

[Dephex Twin]

Well, Adobe's brought a good number of products over to Mac OS X, whereas Quark's one product is not only still OS 9, but as a real insult Quark released version 5.0 for OS 9 long after everyone had begun bringing out OS X ports.

So I say, Adobe has earned it in this case. Just my opinion.

I love competition

[legLess]

I love competition. Look at graphics cards: ATI has just overtaken nVidia, who overtook 3dfx, who overtook Matrox, who overtook ATI ... The big winner is the citizen with her wallet, getting an order of magnitude performance increase, for similar cost, every couple years.

I started doing desktop publishing with PageMaker 4, which was right before Quark started to really kick their butts in PC-land. Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus, who'd invested a lot of effort in working with designers and creating a great product. Adobe got complacent and sat on their ass, with the result that Quark crossed platforms and ate their lunch. Now they're coming back with InDesign, which has some great features and usability enhancements that Quark can't touch (OS X support aside).

Another thing helping Adobe is their frankly brilliant positioning of PDF. The network effect of PDF is huge - many print shops are taking files in PDF for complex jobs, and our local paper (The Oregonian - not high class, but not little) asks for ads in PDF. PS is still the standard, but PDF is a nice intermediary. Adobe's turning it into the XML of page layout and design.

Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish. I'm not saying that OSS can't do this, just that it takes a strong vision and committed management to pull off this type of software.

Anyone want to lay odds on Adobe porting it's suite to Linux? OS X support could pull that argument in either direction.

Re:I love competition

[foobar104]

Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish.

I don't agree. Creative tools like Photoshop are all about getting the job done. If you're of an artistic bent-- I work with people who are, and I suppose I am myself-- you want to use tools that are as transparent to you as possible. You want to use tools that don't get in the way. Photoshop is a great tool because it doesn't get in the way. If all you want to do is paint, you can get from zero to painting in about five mouse clicks. It's perfect, or close enough that it doesn't matter.

It's a common misconception that these kinds of programs are all about the UI. In truth, they're all about being really great tools. OSS doesn't generally produce really great tools. It produces tools that range from utterly useless to merely mediocre. The open-source artistic tools out there (Gimp, et al.) are so bad that I happily forked out $1,000 today for yet another copy of the Adobe Design Collection. I would rather pay $1,000 and use those tools than save that money by using the tools that are available for free. And lots of people feel the same way about it.

Apple is desparate

[extrarice]

The Mac is really a niche market - graphic design. If there are no apps to support the designer, Apple goes kaput.
Most (meaning over 90%) publishing houses use Macs and Quark, exclusively, keeping InDesign around just for experimentation and compatability. If someone sumbits a job in Page Maker, they will get the job returned. Apple knows this, and since Quark really has made little public indication of an X-native XPress in the future (let alone before January 2003 -- when all new Macs will only boot in to X), Apple's main consumer base is at risk. As for right now, migrating all users to InDesign (which can read XPress documents, sort-of) is the best solution for Apple. At least until Apple decides to make that market its own and release iPublish or some other such rubbish.

Re:i don't get it

[sebi]

If what people are used to would prevent them from switching to anything different the world would be pretty boring. Its not like the switch from InDesign to Quark is hard to do. You can change the InDesign shortcuts to the Quark layout if you want to. Importing XPress files into ID works pretty good (So far it worked perfect for me, but the documents I tried it on were not that complex).

If your Printer wont accept either InDesign or PDF files then find one that is allready comfortable with the new millenium. Converting XPress files into PDFs is a nightmare. Exporting ID to PDF is flawless.

If you are comfortable with the other Adobe products (every designer should at least know Photoshop) then getting used to the UI is trivial. And the interface is really intuitive. Working with InDesign sometimes really feels to me as if the application has got some kind of "Do What I Want" functionality. XPress allways made me feel like a sucker with no way out.

Apple bundling this software will give desing shops an incentive to check it out (if they didnt get it in the latest Adobe Design Collection anyway) and see that it truly is a better product.