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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.
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
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.
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?"
For the Mac? Ohh two weeks ago.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
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?
Guess it does :)
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.
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"
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.)
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...
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
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.
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.
$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!
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.
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.
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:.
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?
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.
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.
Quickbooks Pro?!?!? iTunes is free!!!!
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.
Yes, it does. Once you're used to Quark, you can never, never go back; it is the god of its particular niche. It defines the niche.
Unfortunately, it's produced by one of the most greedy, stupid, self-defeating companies existant; they go out of their way to piss their own customers off. It's a real testament to the quality of the Quark the product that people will put up with Quark the company, despite there being reasonable alternatives available.
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.
You don't need Geeksintraining if you're on Slashdot.
Moronic nerd post of the day!
Quark is used to layout stuff like that issue of Maxim you've been drooling over or that Amazon.com ad in the Sunday paper. Its used to layout and design major publications with absolute accuracy.
You don't make goddam webpages with it (I guess you could) of type up your resume. LaTeX? Let me guess, you're an engineering major posting from the dorm room?
Start it on source forge, or something, seems like out there must be something that would do for a start.
It's already started. Tell ya the truth, it ain't half bad. It's no Quark or InDesign, but it's still pretty decent. It's called Scribus and I just installed it here on my FreeBSD box.
Pretty screen shots here.
Problem is, no matter how good Scribus gets there's still the little matter of something to replace Illustrator, and some kind of graphics app that can deal with CMYK. Still, it's one heck of a start at it! Just gotta love open source.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Apple releases some new hardware every 3-6 months. 970 rumors have been around for over a year now.
:-)
Yeah, but the G4 towers are loooooong overdue for a major revamp, and within the last two or three days Apple has released the lawyers on a couple rumor sites who had some fairly detailed writeups about forthcoming 970-based machines. Apple may not comment on unreleased products, but when the Cease & Desist orders start flying, it usually means the rumor sites got a little too much correct.
Either way, we find out in less than two weeks, and it won't kill anyone who's in the market for a new Mac to wait that much longer-- but it might kill them if they buy one of the current G4s and a week later Apple releases brand new machines with significantly more bang for the same buck. (Okay, it won't kill them, but they'll probably be pretty pissed off.
~Philly
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.
I've never used Quark and don't reckon I'd drop nearly a grand for such a tool even if I were running OSX, but I'm just curious... every visual page layout program I've used to date has been much more of a pain in the ass to use than the results justified
It's not the tool for you then, if LaTeX can give you what you need. XPress has been -the- tool (despite it being painful in a few areas) for creating magazines, newspapers and pro publications, for a long time. Pick a magazine you like, and it's almost certainly laid out in XPress. Most newspapers, most brochures, most anything professional print. It's not -meant- for producing small school leaflets, or scientific papers, or a resumé or letter to the family.
If you really wanted an example, Compare a standard desktop PC to IBM room-sized big iron, and that's the same kind of comparison as Word/Publisher is to XPress.
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.