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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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Photoshop isn't designed with newspaper production in mind. A decade ago, when I interned at a small newspaper, the staff all used antiquated terminals to save their files while Sue imported it all into Quark on the one Mac in the office and did the entire newspaper layout in a matter of a couple of hours.
Pretty impressive how quickly it allowed the job to be done.
This is an important release for the Mac because a good portion of the design shops are stuck in Mac OS 9 because of Quark. They absolutely won't move to OS X until Quark is available. Some may have moved to InDesign, but many have not.
Since Apple is trying its darndest to kill off OS 9, this will bring a lot of people into the new world.
can you prove that inDesign has gobbled up the marketshare? Seems to me that Quark still has quite the loyal base, especially since companies don't update their computers as compulsively as individuals.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
That Quark is finally coming out with a OS X Version of Quark is indeed important news. But for me who works at a magazine and sees how important it is that everything just WORKS I would say we are a long way from upgrading to either Quark Express 6 or Indesign 2.
Just switching versions is far to dangerous and it takes loads and loads of testing and re-testing to make sure the new software makes the cut. I for one think this is too late - the logical upgrade for many of my collegues in the business have been Windows and Indesign. It's a cheaper and better solutions for those who work in a 99% Windows environment already.
And just for the sake of it - I'm not a Windows troll. I use Mac OS X exclusively at home and both Windows and Mac OS X at work. I love Mac OS X but from an IT Department point of view, Macintoshes are just to darned expensive if you are going to upgrade and buy ten new PowerMacs with ten new versions of QuarkXpress 6.0.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
Yeah, no shit. It's been "announced" for...uh...years.
and will be available as of next week
Yes, and Quark's really looking to make up for all those years of not having a current release- they've bundled Duke Nukem Forever.
On a more serious note, Quark has other problems. When 4.0 came out, a few people upgraded- and they hated it. Everyone else saw how much they hated it, and refused to upgrade. A few shops bought 4.0 in case someone came to them with a 4.0 file, but for the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up.
Now, the interesting question is, how many people are still using 3.x on OS 9? How many of them are going to feel like upgrading both operating system and publishing software? When I worked as a tech for a publishing company, I found the employees to be COMPLETELY fixated on ONE method of doing any particular task- these people will have mental breakdowns switching...
Please help metamoderate.
Acording to the increasing rumors, Apple is about to launch computers with a new line of 64 bit processors, the IBM's 970. It will demand a new OS (that wil be Mac OS X Panther), but should be compatible with a modified version of Jaguar. So, when the new 64 bit Macintoshes are released, the public might have have to wait a few more months for a 64 bit version of Quark...
* Minimum: 128MB RAM, Recommended: 1024MB RAM .. My old Quark 4 recommended 12MB "for graphic intensive documents"
I once had a job that involved connecting to Quark and Pagemaker using their developer interfaces.
I don't know if things are better now, but at that time the Quark API was a nasty mess compared to Pagemakers nice clean well-documented API.
And when I complained about it in a public forum, they had the nerve to send "cease and desist" letters demanding that I take down my comments!
So what will really happen with this release? Will we see droves of people buying OS X now because they've been waiting for the OS X version of Quark?
To be honest, I hope there is no big change in anything. I think Quark acted like a bratty little kid that expected the entire Mac marketplace to wait for them to release the next version. It's pretty inexcusable to use your "we're the standard for top quality publishing software" status to just sit back and work at your leisure. I seriously hope InDesign picked up a bunch of their market share so the people at Quark can be all confused as to why they only sold 100 units.
But...I just want them to learn a lesson. I don't want them to go out of business for their dumbass decisions. They need to keep pressuring Adobe and Adobe needs to keep pressuring them. I hope this is just a big kick in their ass that makes them put out an even better version next to regain their market share.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
My school used Quark and kept OS 9 arround just for quark but when it came down to it they really wanted to move to OS X for next fall and they will. When they started planning it there was no word of Quark coming out of OS X so they've already bought Adobe inDesign licenses. Too late for Quark.
I bought Diablo II the day it was available for the PC - the CDs were hybrid Mac/Windows CDs.
The *game* was available - seems that Blizzard held back in the *installer* for ages.
That pissed me (and a lot of others) off.
Quark made a *huge* mistake by taking this long to get to OSX.
Quark has...problems....
I worked at quark back in the late 90s. And believe it or not, they had internal versions of XPress running on Max OSX back then -- not Aqua versions, but running versions of XPress nonetheless.
The thing is...they fired everyone. Shortly after I left, I found out that the company fired nearly every one of it's most knowledgable developers. Senior staff. People who wrote the original XPress code. And then, a few years ago, Tim Gill sold his share to his partner, Fred Ibrahimi. And that was pretty much it for the Quark software developer. Tim was responsible for feeding and care of the techies, so to speak, and when he left, I know that a lot of people were concerned for their jobs.
For kicks, I just took a look at the Quark jobs webpage. Turns out, they have two jobs available in Denver -- one product management, and one product analyst. However, they have nearly 20 jobs available in Quark India.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Quark's mismanagement of it's technical staff is what has led to these abysmal release schedules, and they don't seem to be getting any better. It's kind of a shame. Quark was a fun company.
I previewed the final candidate for Mac OS X a couple of weeks ago, and I'm sad to say that it's not getting any better. It requires you to put in everything imaginable about who you are and where you work. I don't think it asked about your salary, but I don't remember much after I started hammering in bogus info.
I don't understand in the first place why, because it's software, or because it's an online service, we're expected to fork over so much info about ourselves these days. I have *already paid* for this software -- thousands of dollars per year leave this office for Quark's headquarters in support contracts and licensing fees -- and yet, they can't help basically disabling the stuff we've given money for until we put in at least *something*. It's so aggravating. It's like they just want the door to hit you in the ass on the way out of their shop.
In the meantime, InDesign is quite nice. I'm taking this opportunity to broaden my skill base.
And I don't mean a tiny little bug; I predict a veritable cornucopia of showstopping bugs that will send prepress people reeling.
Quark, as a company, have been sitting on their collective asses for a very long time. The cash cow that Quark has become made them complacent. I remember a running joke amongst my print industry friends, being that a new version of Quark was basically a rotation of the splash screen.
And don't even make me bring up Metropolis, which joins others of its ilk in the historical dustbin of software that was so fucking great, the chatter around it literally transmogrified into pure greed and killed it in the end. Quark did that. (okay, so I did bring it up.)
So, I was thinking, now that the long delay is over, what happens if there's some kind of massive bug in Quark 6? People have been waiting so long for this thing that it had better be totally bulletproof... which of course it won't.
Quark has a history of shoddy work, draconion copy-protection methods (still shipped floppies to Mac users well after Apple stopped shipping floopy-capable Macs... everyone I know uses the Disc Copy trick and knows it by heart for installing Quark), and all sorts of stupid web-based initiatives in their print product.
No, I think there will be bugs, and Quark won't fix them (certainly not right away). I can see it already with Acrobat incompatibilities - and Adobe has a vested interest in screwing Quark now. Acrobat combined with Quark was the killer combo a couple of years ago, let's see how they play with InDesign in the water. Add in OS X and its just bound to happen... maybe I'm off-base saying such a thing, but I bet I'm right.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It has for our company. We make phone book publishing software, and we are currently porting our Quark plugins to indesign. And that means ~50-75 of our customers heading that direction as well. Not to mention some of our customers have been using indesign ahead of us for some time now and are clamoring for this.
The image on Apple's home page seems to have Quark Xpress in DVD-like packaging. Is that how it really comes? I would love if all software moved over to that kind of much more compact packaging. And I could also hide my GameCube games on the same shelf.
Are you a troll, or just an idiot?
1. QuarkXPress is written in Carbon, which is a direct descendent of the Macintosh Toolbox. There are no Carbon implementations for other operating systems, nor, realistically, can there ever be.
2. It will not be hard to port QuarkXPress to another UNIX. It will be impossible.
3. It will not be an interesting tinker project. It will be a profoundly dull one, because the answer is immediately obvious: no.
4. Apple will not port Mac OS X to anything other than the Macintosh family of computers because Apple is not a software company. Apple is a hardware company.
If you have been alive for more than about fifteen minutes, you'd know the answers to these questions. So you're either an idiot, or a particularly bad troll.
Most InDesign users wouldn't be sending out InDesign format documents to prepress, they'd be sending PDFs.
.. Now on to other places. I haven't seen any company involved in printing that does not handle pdfs. even tiny copy service companies like kinkos require pdfs. The only limitation I've found is in the version of acrobat that they support.
The last time I came across a print related company that did not handle pdf's was some time in the 90's like 1997 or perhaps earlier.
Must limit their options... I have a hard time finding shops that will accept PDFs.
I must disagree. I can't argue with your own personal experience, but your statement is totally counter to my own experience. I work for a print house in RTP, NC and adobe acrobat is seriously embedded in everything we do. Of course we use macs and quark.. graphic designers tend to have no ability to learn anything new and thats basically all there is to say to that. But I was talking about acrobat. Practically everything in the industry handles pdf as well as postscript. Even the xerox docutech and docucolor printers we have have acrobat imbedded in them. And the docutech is controlled by a sun running solaris.
I think a lot of people are missing the really exciting parts about this release - not the "oh, finally" sentiment, but the reasons WHY it took so long.
The huge reason, obviously, is that Quark is a Mach-O application. This is the most "native" an app can get in Mac OS X. Gives it the ability to run at a lower level and access more APIs than any other type of Mac OS X application. Quark 6 ONLY runs on Mac OS X 10.2 or higher. No 9 support at all. This means that Quark had to be overhauled and recoded pretty extensively. This isn't just a quick Carbon hack.
Speaking of quick Carbon hacks, Adobe's InDesign, while I love working with it, suffers from just this problem. Doesn't take advantage of Services, is slow and kludgy to work with, and generally feels like an OS 9 application with an OS X theme. And 2 was not a huge improvement over 1.x speed-wise. Adobe would do well to take a cue from Quark and really optimize their programs for X instead of just getting them running.
Beyond that, it looks as if the UI has undergone significant changes with many new menu options, reorganized menu options, and some very cool portable-content type tools and abilities that will make the entire design process smoother and allow graphic designers to worry less about file management and more about color matching and negative space. this can only mean better designed print material, which makes me happy. I can't stand half-assed media filling up the world's newsstands.