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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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Finally. I work at a newspaper and the fact that there was no QuarkExpress support for OSX has kept us from updating our macintoshes. We can finally get back up-to-date.
It feels more to me like Novel finally announcing a Windows 95 version of WordPerfect long after Word 6.0 had gobbled up the market.
The king is dead! Long live King InDesign!
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
That's why Quark is still selling QXP 4 alongside QXP 5.
This will be a threefold issue:
The process of Carbonizing QuarkXPress plugins will certainly be a lengthy one. While certainly some plugin manufacturers will be on the ball and have been working on Carbonizing their plugins for some time using prerelease versions of QuarkXPress 6, there are many others who will be lax to support OS X and consequently have not begun any development effort towards an OS X port and probably won't until a large enough contingent of their userbase is complaining about lack of an OS X version to force them to port.
So, bottom line, don't expect all the world's print houses to go OS X overnight.
> Adobe's inDesign has effectively gobbled up all of
> the old Quark marketshare, since it has had OSX
> presence for over a year now...
You're failing to account for all the older prepress houses that pretty much cut their teeth using quark, and are still lagging behind using older installs that the last version ran on.
It's been years since I've had any contact with this industry but I know these people, this is how they work. Once they fixate on a given piece of software, that's all they use. The arguments of the virtues between pagemaker and quark got downright nasty sometimes.. a lot like the unix vi/emacs debate.
I think this new release will do just fine. Yeah the impact won't be as big as it could have been, but it's hardly to the point that quark is doomed.
I seriously doubt that Quark will EVER release a 64-bit version, at least not for a very long time. There just is no point. Does quark do a lot of high precision calculations? Does it need a more memory space than 32-bits provides? I doubt that its needs push a 32-bit system in any way that would make the change necessary. The gains that the rumored system would provide to Quark are related to memory bandwidth and are unlikely to be affected by the change to 64-bits.
Unlike Windows, where everything breaks ever service pack, or Linux, where stuff has to be ported to every combination of distribution kernel and libc version... I can take my NeXT code from ~1992 and compile it unchanged on OS X 10.2 becasue Apple does things right the first time.
So I'm 100% sure compiling Quark for a G5 w/10.3 will just be a matter of hitting the build button.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Yeah, and the same happened with XPress 5. We switched to XPress 4 one year ago (because the clients started using it more than once a year), but most people still use 3.32 for the stuff where they can choose. From my perspective, XPress 5 added a new splash screen when starting up, a useless implementation of XML output and Web features that simply don't belong into a PAGE LAYOUT APPLICATION FOR PRINT (dammit).
I work in what I'd consider a typical prepress company, we have about 40 workstations, mostly G4, the rest G3, all with decent RAM (1-2 GB), all running OS9 with a similar set of the common applications (XPress, Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and so on). We definitely don't upgrade to QXP6, and we definitely don't upgrade to OSX. We'd have to get new licenses for about all of our software as working in Classic sucks ass, and it's because a) it's REALLY expensive and b) the people will be unable to work efficiently with OSX for at least one or two months. Remember, these are people who used to work manually without computers, then learned to use a Mac, and who are used to doing things a certain way. They aren't dumb though - actually they are great in improvising stuff in OS9, but OSX would simply break too many of their "shortcuts" to even be considered.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Seriously. Apple could have gotten more switchers just by porting CounterStrike from way back then thorugh its 'Switch' ads. Too late.
Though true that this is how many design houses work, I can say that it's unnecessary. My publication had been working on quark for its entire Electronic Life, and we converted over to InDesign for X. There was grumbling at first, but nobody would consider going back to Quark now. It took about 2 weeks to get back up to speed on an 80-100 page weekly publication. It was an easy, easy transition.
.0 version of Quark actually work?
The questions that will really define Quark's continued success in the marketplace are: 1) Will it work; 2) if it doesn't, is Quark still going to act like they're the only game in town. If 1 is no (likely) and 2 is yes (also likely), then Quark is going to lose a lot of people. I mean, when is the last time you saw a
Me, I'm happy with having been using InDesign for OS X for the past 8 or so months, and I can't wait for the next version.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
[quote]
Now, the interesting question is, how many people are still using 3.x on OS 9?
[/quote]
My father is the editor and publisher for four quarterly magazines. He has the latest Apple hardware, and uses OS 9 and Quark 3.32 exclusively. He'll never upgrade, and here's why: "If it aint broke, don't fix it".
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Don't agree with the overall theme of your message--Quark f*cked up bigtime, they got lazy with their near monopoly of desktop publishing software and is a bad spot now. But to say it "has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare" is absolutely false. Totally disregarding the huge number of shops that don't change because they don't have to (unlike computers geeks who upgrade for fun) the vast number of Quark XTensions are a huge factor too. Is there a replacement for www.kytek.com's AutoPage, for instance?
I think for the non-professional Adobe has probably done an amazing job of dominating quark--but there is a large portion of the market that hasn't switched, and isn't able to.
Rest assured the Mac version won't come with floppies ;)
Way back in '94, when the first PowerMac's shipped, there were essentially 2 ways to make Mac software: Apple's MPW and Symantec's Think C. MPW was designed for/by unix heads and is horrendously unpleasant to learn, slow and awkward but not too bad to use; Symantec was the forerunner of modern IDE development software. They pretty much owned the market.
When the PowerMac appeared, neither was really capable of making PowerPC native applications. There were (crude, difficult) workarounds, or you could buy an IBM RS6000 and develop on that (if you were very rich and very patient: the learning curve & workaround list was worse than MPW.)
Enter Metrowerks, a then little known company who provided the first practical development tools, with zero support from Apple who favored Symantec. Today they own the market (MPW is dead; Apple's free tools are kind of usable, for shareware-level projects.) Symantec waited a year or so before releasing their own PowerPC tools: they made a big announcement and confidently expected us all to rush to them. What happened? Heard of Symantec development tools on Mac lately?
The moral of this story is left as an exercise....
Quark Xpress were one of the first Carbon applications demonstrated back in the introduction of Mac OS X on how easy and quick it would be to port existing applications to the new system.
They were really wrong appearantly.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
And this is a good reason why you can't count Quark 6 as a sure-fire winner yet. QXP6 won't save down to anything past Quark 5, unless they've changed something since the last beta I saw. That means to output a file to many pubs/print shops, you'll need to save that Quark 6 file down to 5, open it up again in 5, save it down to 4 and pray that nothing happened to your layout. Hell, I've got some pubs that won't accept anything but a Quark 3.32 file!
Combine this with the fact that Quark has re-written their print engine for the second time in two releases (and we all now how well recieved 5 was) so who knows what kind of PS will come out of that, and my decision to switch to ID seems pretty good. Besides which I can set my Adobe rep on any pub that has problems. All I get from my Quark rep is a message saying that her voice mail box is full.
Anyone else getting a flashback
Forget Diablo II. I'm having anticipatory nightmares about the problems the first OS X version of Quark is going to have.
My wife runs a graphic design company that is all on Macs running OS 9, and they just bought a stockpile of the G4s that will still run OS 9 before Apple shuts the door on OS9 completely. The reason ? They're having a hell of a time with the new OS X software, and a hell of a time getting it OSX to do the things they want to do. From Filemaker to Photoshop to simple things like printing, it's been a nightmare for them. There are *lots* of things that don't "just work".
Not to mention, when I went to *boot* her new G3 iBook into OS X for the first time, the damn thing locked up and would no longer boot, even off the CD, just presenting some weird message to cycle the power. You'd think this would be covered under Apple's warranty - hell, if the computer crashes when you do exactly what it says in the booklet, there's something wrong and it should be fixed under warranty - but she had to call her service company up, and pay for their time during which they pulled the drive and had to do a fresh install of the whole thing. What did they tell her ? They recommended that she *not run OSX* !! Her service company also SELLS Macs, by the way.
It's telling when people are buying older computers just because they don't want to get pushed kicking and screaming into the latest thing.
I have always thought that tis is a messed up way of doing business. I have always viewed a print shop like this: If they couldn't accept a file from me, THEY were SOL. After all, there are good printers out there who will work with you, and not against you.
I have always laughed at the sneering record-store guy attitude that many print houses, and other businesses in fact, employees take. It's like this - I can always spend my money at your competitor, so don't make me!
The parts of the composition that have dynamic ranges (usually reproduced photographs) are usually created or edited in a photo editing program, often photoshop. Any "straight" text (Not blurred or manipulated) is positioned and controlled using Xpress/ InDesign/ Pagemaker.
As you know, Photoshop is because it makes it so intuitive to edit selected parts of an image in whatever way you desire, without knowledge of f-stops, tonal range and lens filters
Quark's Xpress allows a blend of very intuitive text placement, and a framework for remarkably precise control of any attributes, such as spacing, size, color et all. Quark also has optional numeric placement (think X-Y coordinates), as well as shape/outline tools. Any shape can be used as a container for imported/linked images of several formats, as well as text.
None of this changes the fact that Quark Xpress is sort of kludgey. But it's kludgey in a very unique way, that once you're used to it, everything else seems foreign. Sort of like Windows :-)
Finally, as a young NYC designer (who uses PCs + Macs at work), I can assure you that even the "low" prices charged by small/bargain companies make Quark look affordable fast. Want to create/sell adhesive vinyl signs, such as those featured on storefront windows, Hot-Dog Pushcarts and the doors of commercial vehicles? You're looking at $800 for the low cost version of the software, and at least $1500 for a small 24" plotter/cutter.