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?"

Comments

Sweet

[krisp]

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.

Don't expect widespread adoption now

[ikewillis]

Print houses and others in the preprint industry dependent on QuarkXPress for business (and therefore currently on OS 8/9) are unlikely to convert to OS X in the near term.

This will be a threefold issue:

• Those wary of change will be unwilling to switch to the new operating system
• Similarly, there are those who are wary of changing to a new application following a release, because they are scared of bugs which won't be found through regression testing and won't see the light of day until the product sees widespread public use
• And last but certainly not least, the problem which will hold back those who actually want to change: plugins

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.

Re:Too late for Quark...

[Xzzy]

> 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.

Re:Special Bundle

[Doctor O]

for the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up

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.

Re:Special Bundle

[extrarice]

[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".

Symantec all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

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....