Slashdot Mirror
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?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores No, but I got whiplash when I saw the $899.95 pricetag! :)
really the last huge Mac application that wasn't ported to OS X. Now the brand new Macs at my school's newspaper can actually use the OS they were meant to run.
I don't recall the name of the guy who runs Quark, but he was always known for talking about how the Mac is "a dying platform". He can also be seen making first post's to slashdot stories regarding BSD and Netcraft.
Vonal Declosion
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?
Ah yes.. because when I think of QuarkExpress, I immediately think of slaying demons, collecting precious gems, and casting magic spells on vicious great spiders.
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....
sure, because i always equate decapitating the undead with aligning text! bring me the +5 ringlets of helvetica!
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
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.
Quark is a very arrogant company. They are two years late, have abhorrent licensing terms, screw over their customers, and there's usually lots of bugs in their initial releases.
Plus: InDesign from Adobe has been out for, what? 2 years?
That's why Quark is still selling QXP 4 alongside QXP 5.
and I have no clue about Quark Express, so according to good tradition, this is the right story to post my opinion on.
I just have to say that Quark Express is the worst f***** web browser EVER! And they've taken away all of the good options from the last version. Quite frankly I'm scared that Quark Express will be totally useless as a web browser with version 7.
Works well. I'm running it on GNU/Hurd v1.0. Shame I had to stop playing Duke Nukem Forever to check it out.
Just popping out in my hover car...
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
I thought this was about as likely as having Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Husein singing the American National Anthem in the style of a boy band.
Goes to show... anything could happen.
Did anyone see that pig flying past the window?
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.
okay, i have photoshop. now which PAGE LAYOUT PROGRAM should I get with my remaining $290.95?
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
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.
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?"
For the Mac? Ohh two weeks ago.
Trolling is a art,
This looks like it could be some crafty timing to move some inventory of G4 Powermacs out the door. Lots of folks have said they are waiting on new hardware purchases since the latest G4's don't boot into OS 9, rendering them useless for Quark.
And once the inventory is moving, in advance of WWDC, who knows what might be announced there...
Or I could just be talking out of my ass.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
And I guess with the $290.95 savings you can spend time looking into the fact that Quark isn't a graphics program!
and hell just froze over.. ;-) ...and finally Apple can ditch OS9 und announce 64Bit Macs.
Well, you could do that, but Photoshop and Quark XPress fill two pretty seperate niches. Page layout has a unique set of requirements as compared to bitmap graphic composition.
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Quark is a layout program. Photoshop is a photo/image editing program. Just because they are used by the same people/in the same industry, doesn't mean they do the same things.
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...
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.
There are probably more people who abandond Macs altogether and went over to Wintel machines so they could run the next version of Quark than Mac users who stayed and switched to Adobe's inDesign.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Or save yourself several hundred dollars and pick up a copy of, say, Quickbooks Pro. No, it's not the same function as Quark, but neither is Photoshop, so I didn't think it mattered.
What? Photoshop and Quark do two entirely different jobs. I can't imagine designing a newspaper, book or magazine in Photoshop, or manipulating an image in Quark.
It's not a 1337 graphx program. It's a desktop publishing application. One of the best widly used one.
Saying to get photoshop over it is like saying to get a refrigerator instead of an oven just because they're both used in the kitchen.
Quark and Photoshop have differnt purposes wholely.
You're either a troll or an idiot. Photoshop is an image manipulation package. QuarkXPress, like InDesign, is an advanced publishing and layout package... most people use Photoshop and Illustrator in concert with a layout package, but neither is a replacement for Quark/InDesign.
Might I suggest you RTFA/RTFWS (website) next time?
frome Apple's page:
/background voice: this is a point-OH release.
QuarkXPress has deservedly gained a reputation for reliable printing, offering consistent and dependable output that prevents costly mistakes.
You mean like every Quark point-oh release?
Ummm, errrr...never mind.
(is this the release with even more annoying copy protection than WPA? Because they seem to have left it off of Apple's write up...I wonder why?)
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Guess it does :)
"Duke Nukem Forever has been released."
But the Mac OSX version has been delayed until Quarter 3, just in time for the 2010 Holidy Season.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Just got off the phone with Quark Education Sales. They are claiming it's been pushed back "around 3 weeks." They weren't clear if this was for Quark 6 in general or just the education lab paks.
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.
Quark 6 finally shipping. What's next, Duke Nukem Forever coming out next week?
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
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...
No, but I got whiplash when I saw the $899.95 pricetag!
I'll trade you 5 SOJs for it!
* Minimum: 128MB RAM, Recommended: 1024MB RAM .. My old Quark 4 recommended 12MB "for graphic intensive documents"
Mac users remember all to well the number of applications that broke in the change from 10.1.x to 10.2. Wonder how long it'll take Quark to make QuarkXPress 6 work properly with Mac OS X 10.3, due out in a few months.
Bugs? In Quark? That's crazy talk. Didn't you see? According to Apple, it "runs flawlessly" under OS X.
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
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.)
...a Beowulf cluster of Quarks...
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...
It's funny because this is a really, really old troll. Who types responses to slashdot in BBEdit? Are you stupid? Just stop. seriously. If you had an actual complaint you wouldn't post as an anonomous coward.
- Sherman
Red Vs. Blue did a parody of the Apple "Switch" ads, except with a gamer. Good stuff.l
http://www.redvsblue.com/appleswitch.shtm
Clearly, putting the word "express" in the name of the product reveals a sense of humor previously unsuspected at Quark... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
If you buy two copies you get the next one 1/3 off! Woo hoo!
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.
Does quark do a lot of high precision calculations?
Being a professional layout application, I would think it does! Basically a layout app is doing rendering of fonts and graphics to a page in very precise ways - it's why you'd use Quark or InDesign instead of Word.
Also, it needs to work with very large media and high color depths.
All sorts of things in the page layout space can take advantage of 64 bit processor features.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Quark still makes up the vast majority of DP's choice of page layout app. The figures, although kept very quiet by Adobe AND Quark show anywhere between 70-90% Quark dominance.
Quark made a huge mistake, but they had the market share to withstand it.
I work in this industry, with many printers and designers and can tell you that VERY few have switched, at least from my seat...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Yeah, flawlessly, with all of the new "features". ^_^
I just got off the phone with Quark Customer Service and they said that information is incorrect. Quark is holding off on the release for more testing over the next couple weeks and a decision will be made soon on when to release it. If you don't believe me, call 1-800-676-4575 and ask for Patti. Then again this is Quark and their BS smells as bad as what come out of Washington D.C. and Redmond.
WOW, now you'd better get a new 64MB SIMM to upgrade your good 'ol Mac!!! Otherwise you will not be able to run the latest version of Quark. You bought the previous version and the PM at the same time, right?
Brace yourself for the speed bump in copying files. After the surrealistic experience, shut up.
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.
Uhm... InDesign has been available for quite some time now. InDesign 2 is a great product, and offers several features that Quark does not, particularly centering around integration with other Adobe apps, such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
As far as a time lag between Mac OS X release and Quark 6 release, I think that has more to do with the fact that 6 appears to be a complete re-write, and not just a carbonized version of Quark 5. Quark 6 will not run on any Mac OS prior to Jaguar.
I'm sure a lot of people have already switched over to InDesign, but as someone who has used Quark for years it is a difficult and annoying switch, but Quark left little choice for people. Quark 4 and 5 were buggy in classic and it was difficult to deal with fonts when using classic and OS X together. On the other hand, there are also a lot of people who are still hanging on to their G3s waiting until a native Quark is available before upgrading to OS X and buying a new G4 (or G5). These people are desperate for new computers with full harddrives, not enough memory, and worse, they can't use Safari. Also, when their mouse dies, it is difficult ot find an ADB mouse that works on a G3, so they end up buying a USB mouse and some dorky converter. The release of Quark 6 will finally allow them to upgrade. This must be a large group of people and hopefully it will translate into a good surge of sales for apple.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say, right now, that QX 6.0 won't cut it. In fact, if we can go by Quark's history, QX 6.1 won't quite cut it either (think 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, 4.1).
Oh, I'm sure it'll be good enough for some people who stay within a feature subset but there'll be gaping holes in things like Applescript support, and they won't even be addressed for another couple releases.
Let's just say that I'm not expecting to boot my work machine in OSX until next year.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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!
Well, Adobe abandoned hope of any PROs using PageWaster, since it still hasn't changed much since version 4.2.
Rumor has it that Adobe already finished InDesign 3.0 and has been waiting for Quark 6 to ship before unleashing it.
Jory
Hmmm... Considering that the two applications are designed for radically different purposes, you won't get much page layout work done in Photoshop.
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....
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.
> According to Apple, it "runs flawlessly" under OS X
Yeah, as long as you don't do anything with it. That includes printing.
Salsa Shark. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
and they want their press release back.
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.
Sounds like some of the early adopters may have a valid false advertising claim based on the "runs flawlessly" statement on Apple's web site.
QuarkXPress has deservedly gained a reputation for reliable printing, offering consistent and dependable output that prevents costly mistakes.
That's gotta be a typo - I'm sure it was supposed to say "causes costly mistakes."
Salsa Shark. We're gonna need a bigger boat.
since the latest G4's don't boot into OS 9, rendering them useless for Quark.
People keep saying this... but Quark 4 & 5 ran fine in Classic mode within OS X. Don't get me wrong, I think it is way overdue to have a native OS X version of Quark... but you didn't have to boot OS 9 to run existing Quark versions.
.:diatonic:.
... was the app I meant to mention. It was pronounced 'metropolis' and I just did a stream-of-consciousness thing there.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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?
I actually wish you were right, but I don't think so. I use QuarkXPress for quite a number of things I do, and I'm still running 4.04 in Mac OS X's Classic mode. Here's the bad thing from Adobe's point of view. I have had InDesign 2.0.1 on my Mac for quite some time, but I haven't used it for a single project yet. Why? Two reasons. 1) I know how to crank something out in QuarkXPress very quickly. I'm sure I could use InDesign to do just as well, but I ALREADY know how to use XPress. When I'm ready to do a job, I use the tool I already know. And when I'm NOT doing a job, the last thing I want to do is learn new software. 2) When I burn a job onto a CD to give to a printer, I KNOW that any printer I deal with can deal with a QuarkXPress file. I don't personally know of a printing company near me that is using InDesign yet. I've been asking the people I deal with. They seem to know what InDesign is, but they're in no hurry to support it.
For these reasons, I suspect that Quark will sell many, many copies of XPress. I can't stand the company, but I suspect that others will keep using their product, for reasons similar to mine.
English is not my native language, troll.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
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.
Does Quark suck less? Does it suck enough less to actually justify that price tag if you're in an industry that needs that kind of layout power? If I were in the industry, I'd be tempted to get the local LaTeX guru to throw together some macros, take all stories in ASCII plain text, and let LaTeX put the paper together. I have yet to try a WYSWYG tool that can match LaTeX for ease of use or quality of output.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So Q XPress is on a (albeit closed) BSD based platform... will it be hard to map this across to other BSDs, then other *NIXs.
Yeah yeah, not easy, but an interesting reverse engineer tinker possibility.
If Apple put OSX on x86 platforms, then it would kick ass (almost as much as Slackware and EMACS etc misc Linux pleasing comments).
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.
Maybe if all you quark using people/shops would all chip in and pay a couple of programmers to design or work on an open source equivalent? How many current quark customers are there, hundreds of thousands? 100$ a piece per shop towards some core developer programmers might do the trick, doncha think, at least to get it the ball rolling on something just as good and free and open source? Start it on source forge, or something, seems like out there must be something that would do for a start.
It may RUN fine...
but try setting up printers/scanners etc. with drivers for both OS X and OS 9 in the same box.. gets hairy quickly(and what if your printer doesn't have OS X drivers.. you upgrade.. whoops, this new one doesn't have OS 9 drivers.. thats another possible problem). And the graphic designers who use this stuff don't want to have to play with the chooser or the OSX stuff, AND have to keep it straight, while they should be printing and working on something else.
Quickbooks Pro?!?!? iTunes is free!!!!
Oh, and theres the possibility(I don't know for sure, I don't read the rumor sites for apple stuff) that they're completely removing OS 9 from the hard drives, rather than merely crippling it. Without OS 9 installed, there IS no classic mode.
You're joking right???
OS X Classic mode sucks big time. Sorry to burst your bubble, but emulation ain't the real thing. It causes more problems than it fixes. It's been a nightmare trying to make apps work in classic mode, and when I say work, I mean 80 to 85% functionality(fonts, printing, scanning, etc.)
Besides, rumor has it that Apple is going to dump classic mode one day soon. And I thought MS was bad... that was before I used a Mac.
i work in publishing as an editor, and I have to say that quark for x is bigger than most of you seem to imagine. Most publishing houses still run quark 3,33 from waaay back. Why? Because when you do a print run for a million books or so it had better work, and 3,33 works. Publishing could care less for a new os, what they care about is new tools - like this one. And since it is for OS X, its good for apple too. Now the last excuse has gone, even though publishing will probably still stick to their 603e macs and quark 3,33 for a while yet ...
...
Oh. And Quark is usually twice the price for 6x, so $899 is actually ann amazing price as well
For around the same price as Quark XPress 6 (after the slimmed down introductory pricing) you can get the Adobe Print Package (InDesign 2 + Illustrator 10 + Photoshop 7 + Acrobat 6) for $1199.
Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing.
No Linux version of Quark Xpress for Linux so far? Apple made Quark Xpress only for Apple OS? That's not a news. I knew it before. Tell me what I did not know yet.
Less is more !
Hell was a nippy 40 degrees and my toilet flushed in the other direction... more news as it becomes available.
The prerformance was fine. And it worked stable. It never crashed the "main" OS (Linux). And it much less often crashed its shelling OS (MacOS9), in fact just one time - compare it to booting MacOS9 and count how many times you have to reset your Mac per day!
Less is more !
Apple releases some new hardware every 3-6 months. 970 rumors have been around for over a year now. Since apple refreshes each product in their lineup about every year, chances are, when you buy something, something better will come along with in 12 months, usually much less. So if you need it, buy it, and dont worry if the 970 comes out in a month, because by then there will be rumors that the 980, or whatever the next processor is is right around the corner so just wait a few months, at which time there will be rumors about the 990.... ad infinitum.
I worked for a company that was a mTropolis beta site and I really miss that program. At the time [1996] it was leaps and bouds ahead of Director. They were mired by both an absurd retail price [$5000 when it was released] and the fact that everyone was used to the Director timeline-based model for interactive media. Object oriented logic is tough for a lot of programmers.
Anyway, it's s shame Quark ran it into the ground, it had a lot of promise.
...and stuff... ehm.. sorry..
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
you just put directly on the page - it is the frame idea that is a little left field
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.
http://saveie6.com/
Although now that Q6 is out, I gotta go pick up a copy, just to check it out.
Having used it for a week now, faster and more stable are the significant improvements. It's nice of them to fix some of the Qirks, but in the process they seem to have introduced some new ones.
Acrobat 6 rocked my world a few weeks ago (more properer on-screen RIP and non-sucking preflight capabilities) and about an order of magnitude more than Quirk 6.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
In point of fact, there is relatively little that Quark does that LaTeX and comparable, proprietary pagination engines cannot. Those few features that aren't supported are typically used to facilitate contorted, anxious and befuddled layout and the routine abuse of typeforms. Indeed, we are not far from XML/SVG layout systems which will finally eliminate the middling DTP market (Quark, InDesign), unless our tastes have been so abused that we no longer recognize quality in page composition.
If you give it a moment's thought, I think you can recognize that using Quark is rather a lot like editing 400 pages individually in vi, only with lots of little buttons. Quark's claim to greatness is its WYSIWYG system, but it was implementated in such a slipshod manner (best example, the complete divergence between picture and text boxes) that it seriously hinders the software growing with its primary markets. There is the catalog of Xtensions which reads like a testament to Quark's failures: H&J, flow constraints, templating limitations, data import and export. Finally, last I looked, XML support was profoundly limited by some childish assumptions about the technology. That alone should (I pray God) ensure that this rev of Quark is the last.
Power to the people and PDF to the presses!
illegitimii non ingravare
I've been spending quite a bit of time looking at using DocBook and CSS to do layout for a book. If you read the documents they seem to suggest they offer much more than Quark. I downloaded a demo of Quark and I thought the OS alternatives had a good point. Can any of you Mac fans explain where the Mac solution would put DocBook/CSS to shame.
Well, I'd say that the fact that you can get InDesign for a fraction of the price of Quark XPress is a boon to Adobe. Now we can just wait for ID3 to come out and Quark will once again be behind.
On a side note, It's a boon for Apple that Quark has finally gotten their head out of their arse, but it's a day late and a dollar short...
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
I use Quark 4.10 in prepublishing; I decided against upgrading to Quark 5, since it didn't offer anything needed [Quark 4 is fine], and all my computers are slow [fastest is 400 Mhz, but I also have 333, and 240].
Now Quark 6 is coming out, and I'm looking at this and thinking "I can't afford all new computers. I'm going to have to stick with 4.10".
But then I saw your post. Maybe sticking with 4.10 *is* best.
But you know what I'd really like? I'd like a real, web-based, open-source EPS-based document processor.
I had moved to Lithuania, in order to take advantage in the difference in labor expenses, and I used to think that I'd get far enough ahead that I could develop this. However, after 1 year of problems with immigration, 2 years of slave-driving teaching schedules [I have to have *reason* to be here, and the reason was a teaching job for $250/month, but 40 hours became 80 hours. That's done, now that we've incorporated] followed by the deliberate devaluation of the American dollar, and I begin to think that we'll never get it produced.
I just don't have the assets.
Indeed, I begin to think that my greatest chances of going out of business aren't coming.
Oh, well. It could've been good -- that's life.
Anyhow, Quark's mismanagement seems to be mismatched by mismanagement the world over, from the bottom up, or the top on down. Fortunately we have the FSCOree Software Foundation and Linux. Maybe that'll survive.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Waddayaknow
Three weeks ago, the graphics people at my add-agency gave up waiting for Quark for OSX, and bit the bullet and learned InDesign.
Quark really blew it with this one. The people we have were very happy with it, even though it was old & clunky.
This is both a Troll and flamebait... and some wisdom perhaps. Recently I had to use Quirk again after years of gratefully not having had anything to do with them. (The last time I had anything to do with Quirk was when they killed mTropolis out of sheer stupidity and the user base spent about 6 months trying to get enough money together to buy the code from Quirk, who wanted $1 million, and eventually gave up).
Quirk xDress did the job I needed it to do recently without many problems and was a step above Pagemaker in things such a usage of Fonts and images. The precision is also very good and the printing is very flexible, as are trapping. But it was Quirk 4.1 and the search/replace still fucked up numerous times, just like it always has.
But it "worked" which is exactly why Quirk has remained a staple of many printing shops. This doesn't change the fact that everybody hates Quirk and the whole world thinks Ebrahimi is a useless, greedy wanker.
But it will take more than Xpress6 to get the Xpress4 users to switch. Most shops that have not switched to InDesign have at least one copy around, and would more than likely switch to that when that time finally comes.
And finally... Fuck Quirk once again for killing mTropolis, I still dream about coding a replica myself today.
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.
There are going to be ~100 posts about "Oh who cares, I hate Quark. Everyone should use Indesign. Indesign rocks. It's going to father my babies. Quark stole my babies, and doesn't answer their phones. Apple doesn't need Quark."
Apple does need Quark, just as Apple needs Photoshop no matter what uber-imaging-app might come out next week. Apple not having an OSX version of Quark has hurt them, and hurt OSX.
So if you dig OSX, or have to do print at all... no matter what your feelings on Quark (either the company or the product) this is good news.
Damn I hope it isn't half-assed though. But it will hopefully put the push on the rest of the printing eco-system to catch up over the next year and give OSX some momentum there.
Quark 6 was promised around that time. About two or three years ago.
Yeah, it was promised a long time ago. From what I've heard, though, some of what happened wasnt just with Quark... a LOT of developers got really pissed off at Apple right about then. Much of it was centered around feeling that Apple had misrepresented the maturity of 10.1, and that they were misrepresenting just "how easy" it was to get a very complex OS9 program over to OSX via Carbon... especially due to all of the bugs and missing functionality (a lot having to do with printing).
Since a lot of it was supposed to be fixed in 10.2, a bunch of them just said "ok, we'll ship it for 10.2"... when exactly did photoshop 7 come out for OSX?
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
FYI, while what you say has a lot of truth, there ARE those who have looked and been interested in switching but just couldn't for one reason or another. One 5-10 person shop I'm thinking of ran into a problem where the xtensions they needed for the specific kinds of textbooks they put out don't work with indesign... since 95% of what they do are those textbooks, no go.
but in the process they seem to have introduced some new ones.
What kind of quirks? Have you been able to nail down anything specific? And about Acrobat 6...I haven't got it yet but I have to ask, can you print separations from it? If so, how is it?
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
How? You can't just throw something on the page without a bounding box of some kind. How else will the program know how to flow the text? How else will the program know how to wrap other elements around the text or picture?
PageMaker allowed you to place an image or text without creating a frame first. This, in turn allowed the user to not have to worry about the frame ever getting bigger than the object that was in it; thus making alignment and text wrapping easier. The only time you would notice a "frame" is when you cropped an image. As for text, there were special text frames, but you still didn't have to create them first.
InDesign sorta works like Quark. You may create a frame first, then place an image in it, or place the image on the page and it would create the frame for you. The cool thing that InDesign has (over Q5, at least) is the ability to fit the frame to the object inside it, and vice versa. Plus, with the alignment proxy in the Transform pallette, one can align that frame to any point by its center, left-bottom, left-top, right-center, etc. A minor feature, maybe, but it's pretty damn useful when making sure that images don't bleed over folds and things like that. I have yet to see if Q6 has anything like that.
I'm not saying that one is definitely better than the other. As a pre-press tech, I had to learn every type of layout software there is (our shop never turns anything away, even Publisher *barf*). When I made the switch to OS X from 9 at home, InDesign was the only thing I could use, and I liked it a lot. That's all I'm sayin'.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Sure, if RageMaker or MS Publisher float your boat
If you work in a decent Service Bureau that likes the business that customers bring in, they would have to float your boat. Automatic. If I turned a customer away because I thought they used the wrong layout software, I'd be out of business. Believe it or not, PageMaker still accounts for about 40% of our offset print production. InDesign is about 20% now. Quark? Yeah, about the same as PM.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
since 95% of what they do are those textbooks, no go.
Sounds like a pretty specific clientele that shop has. My shop does everything from movie posters to business cards back to high-lacquer coffee-table books. If we didn't accept InDesign and PageMaker, we'd be out of business. I guess it really depends on what type of design you're privy to. For some, Quark works great. For others, InDesign is the way to go. As the Pre-press Operator, I must use them all. I like them all, too, but for different reasons.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
I could use a print authoring tool like Quark, but I really can't afford $900 for it. $900 is more than my entire budget.
:(
I'd pay $250 or so for Adobe Pagemaker (and actually prefer it,) but there's no Pagemaker for OSX...
Right now I'm using Appleworks.
Are there any other alternatives out there for just basic print page design on OSX?
-- Funksaw
"The present" is always the worst possible time to purchase new hardware.
"Three months from now" is a good time to buy new hardware.
Some consider "this time next year" to be an even better time to buy new hardware.
-Don
Built for Mac OS X Jaguar So, basically, it'll be outdated by the time Panther is debuted at the WWDC?
Please see my other post in this thread, explaining my thoughts on the subject. I have dealt with this issue since my C=64 and I have always simply bought a new computer when I needed it. I looked for the best deal I could find at the time, knowing that within two weeks I would happen across an even better deal. I really think this is a special situation. I work for IBM and I might even buy myself another Mac when the new ones come out depending on performance and price.
Lasers Controlled Games!
The "Stop calling us a bunch of fuckheads or we won't speak to you" mentality is very prevalent at Quark. When the mTropolis userbase were trying to get the money together to buy the code from Quark, one of the conditions that Quark stipulated in buying the code is that people would have to "stop making derogatory comments about Quark". Every was in a hate frenzy about Quark fucking up mTropolis the way it did (no aid for the developers, no advertising, nothing and then just killing it) and even though most of us stopped bad mouthing Quark immediately, the effort was in vain, because Quark was more interested in killing the product than letting others show that it was as good as we all thought.
That version had a pointlessly complex installation/registration process. They actually wanted you to mail in a floppy with the registration info. Dumb. (This was true for the Mac version, as well.)
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
I read a lot of posts claiming that Quark is the lingua franca of the printer/service bureau world. I use InDesign quite a bit, but I use its excellent built in PDF export feature when I'm sending files to a printer. That's more reliable and preferable in every way to sending application files anyway (I don't have to send fonts, external graphics, there's no way to gain/lose lines, etc). It's quickly becoming industry standard in the magazine world, at least. And QuarkXPress is not particularly good at it.
I'm not saying that Quark doesn't have a huge advantage with their market share, but with the shabby way they're treating their corporate customers, there's got to be a better reason to stay on Quark than "it's what my vendors use."
It's true, there may be a major architecture shift in the near future. I don't doubt that you've seen this before and your procurement strategy is sound. But I don't think the situation with new PowerPC's is particularly special.
Consider:
I agree that 64-bit processing across the Mac platform, when it happens, will be a big deal. It may even be the most important development in computer hardware this year. But it will be surrounded by many other important developments in computer hardware.
If the original poster is planning to select a hardware standard for the next twelve months, then it's probably worth waiting to see if the rumors are true (while doing other relevant research).
If we're talking about a discrete purchase, there are clear advantages to buying the OSX-capable hardware available today vs. sticking with older, slower, out-of-warranty hardware.
-Don
Maybe now Quark.com will make it into the default Safari history population.
just the way that illustrator or pagemaker do it. You just put it there - it becomes its own bounding box. I still have trouble making quark do what i want after growing used to illustrator. Text is more difficult ot work with than graphics, but again, it is possible as is seen in illustrator.
PageMaker was also a primitive product that ultimately failed in the marketplace.
Yes that is true - but you cant serously call quark (as it is mostly used in v3.2) an advanced product. It beauty is its simplicity and the fact that the older versions created clean postscript.
In the words of my creativly brilliant yet technically inept friend "it is such a great little scrapbook program".
well, LaTeX may be dandy for laying out text, but it doesn't support color seps, does it? you're definitely sunk in the print world without being able to print separations (and control those seps, ie screen angles, frequency, etc.). perhaps you may be able to wrangle ghostscript into doing that stuff, but why should you when quark, illustrator et al do it out of the box with print publishing in mind? quark certainly has its flaws, but as someone who's been working with it for over 10 years, i can say without a doubt that it's the best tool for the job (along with companions like illustrator, PS, etc.).
Here you are leaving LaTeX behind, but any commercial PS engine manages separations. My point (the expression of my wish, rather) was that the WYSIWYG DTP paradigm is dying at the hands of structured and semi-stuctured XML data. The old is new again.
You're in the industry, you gotta recognize that print production workflows are hopeless at this point in time. Things are treated together that belong apart. The most elemental requirements for archiving or repurposing data are hostage to the friggin' page-preview tool.
illegitimii non ingravare
Given the leak today of the specs of the G5, would you wait?
later,
John
Lasers Controlled Games!