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QuarkXPress 6 For Mac OS X
MikeXpop writes "Apple's front page shows that QuarkXPress has been announced for Mac OS X and will be available as of next week. Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?"
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For all you who aren't Mac ppl, this is a refrence to the fact that Diablo for mac was released WAYYYYYYYYYY after the PC version was. In this case Quark for OSX should have been out a long time ago....
Quark 6 was promised around that time. About two or three years ago.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if their payroll company had to make out a million checks to "monkey." It's been so damned long that Quark 6 became statistically inevitable.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Adobe's inDesign has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare, since it has had OSX presence for over a year now... Quark is going to have to play *serious* catch-up. inDesign also incorporates all of the key Photoshop filters - drop shadows, transparency... making it a very simple thing to keep your design all in one app, w/o having to switch back & forth to Photoshop to get your filters. Quark made a *huge* mistake by taking this long to get to OSX.
Now, they're not only buying OS X.. they need to replace their old G3's with new hardware. Good business for Apple!
Ciryon
And of course, since releasing a native version of XPress two years late isn't enough of a show of contempt for their customers, it has product activation to deal with:
I can upgrade five times? Thanks, Quark! A grace period? Wow, you're so generous, Quark!
OS X is now a real OS. It has Quark XPress...
The Quark software is incredibly anal. The installation forces you to enter piles of personal information, employment information, details about your company, and so on. You can't opt out. And along with the installation CD, it comes with a couple of FLOPPIES! Near the end of the installation it wants the first one and copies some files from it, and then it wants the second one. It writes your registation information onto the second disk and who knows what other information about your computer, products installed, etc. onto it and expects you to mail it to Quark. And then it wants the first disk again and refuses to continue until you let it WRITE to it. Bah, I made a copy of the first disk and let it write to that.
And then when you start up the program, it incessantly bothers you about wanting to send the registration information over the internet.
This is the most annoying, invasive installation I have ever come across. I yes, I have installed Microsoft Windows. If I ever have to buy software for myself for desktop publishing, Quark will be at the BOTTOM of the list.
(Note: I have run across more annoying installations than this, but none of them were as invasive.)
Caution: bitterness alert!
Go ahead and mark me a troll, but I do know whereof I speak when it comes to Quark attitudes and culture, having worked there for a year until my whole project was laid off to celebrate getting a release out the door.
If Quark keeps to its m.o., the team in the U.S. who actually built XPress 6 will now be pink-slipped and the product responsibility transferred to Chandragar, India. No knock against Indian developers in general, but Quark has not adopted a "best programmer rupees can buy" mentality there, and the continued maintenance will probably be a nightmare. Quark India is very Windows-centric, and even at that their programmers are writing C++ and Java like it's Visual Basic.
N.B. by Quark's own versioning rules, this should be XPress 5.5, and they should be charging the minor upgrade price to XPress 5 users. Mac users who bought XPress 5 are getting screwed royally. I'm sure in Fred Ebrahimi's (the owner of Quark) mind, it's justified since the porting effort was so extensive, but the only notable feature is Carbonization. There was a post above that noted Ebrahimi's assertions that the Mac is a "dying platform." Quark didn't even commit to Carbonizing XPress until Mac OS X (and InDesign 2.0) shipped, and Ebrahimi realized the publishing market would dump XPress before they'd dump the Mac. When I was laid off, every program the company had in R&D was Windows-only by design. Talk about a company that doesn't know what side its bread is buttered on - Quark deserves to be reduced to irrelevance just for sheer lack of vision. Go Adobe!
Right...
I work at a major pre-press service bureau in Manhattan. We bought InDesign to support any of our customers who switched over or decided to try it out. We used to be 90 percent Quark and 15 percent Pagemaker in regards as files sent to us by clients counting both Mac 90% and Windows users (10)
Now the work is 99+% Macintosh and virtually all Quark with Pagemaker practically extinct. Since we bought our first Indesign license we've had less then 10 documents total sent to us.
InDesign may be doing well at your school but in the real world here in Manhattan it's been virtually a total no-show. And it's no surprise, aside from the fact it's even slower due to being nothing but plug-ins and container and really bites in the print department, InDesign is little more than a bad reincarnation of PageMaker.
Hold off on purchasing new hardware for a few weeks to see if the 970 rumours are true. How dumb would it be to hold off this long only to purchase new hardware at the worst possible time?
Lasers Controlled Games!
That is until Adobe finishes InDesign which, hopefully, will blow QuarkXPress out of the water.
It's done, bro. Version 2.0.2. Try using it. Unfortunately, many designers are just plain stuck with Quark because they refuse to try anything else. I used Quark for years. Then OS X came out and then InDesign 2.0. Quark was lagging, so I gave InDesign a try. I think it works great! It even has some familiar Quark-style features (like the infamous boxes to place images and text in). The Photshop/Illustrator-style pallets are a breeze, and the proxy for alignment makes the ol' create-a-second-empty-box-to-align-by-center trick in Quark totally archaic.
I am not only a designer, but I am also a pre-press technician, and InDesign writes pretty clean Postscript and integrates well into a Heidelberg Delta/Fuji Topsetter workflow. Give it a shot. Although now that Q6 is out, I gotta go pick up a copy, just to check it out.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
With Quark and InDesign, the focus is not so much organization by context of content, but presentation of content. The ability to lay out a photo-laden text book that will be printed with 6 colours, with a 15-page index at the end and a table of contents is something that i wouldn't trust to a word processor, precisely the same reasoning behind using a site-management tool or a database to drive certain websites, rather than editing 400 pages individually in vi.
imagine having to create an issue of National Geographic using Staroffice. Not the right tool - not the best thing to get the job done.
if you're talking about an instruction manual - sure, LaTex is an option, just as using Lilypond is one for setting music.
quark and InDesign, however, are special tools, with more depth than most casual users need - the professional that needs it, however, /really/ needs it.
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