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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
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.
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?"
For the Mac? Ohh two weeks ago.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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 --
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"
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
Yeah, and the same happened with XPress 5. We switched to XPress 4 one year ago (because the clients started using it more than once a year), but most people still use 3.32 for the stuff where they can choose. From my perspective, XPress 5 added a new splash screen when starting up, a useless implementation of XML output and Web features that simply don't belong into a PAGE LAYOUT APPLICATION FOR PRINT (dammit).
I work in what I'd consider a typical prepress company, we have about 40 workstations, mostly G4, the rest G3, all with decent RAM (1-2 GB), all running OS9 with a similar set of the common applications (XPress, Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator and so on). We definitely don't upgrade to QXP6, and we definitely don't upgrade to OSX. We'd have to get new licenses for about all of our software as working in Classic sucks ass, and it's because a) it's REALLY expensive and b) the people will be unable to work efficiently with OSX for at least one or two months. Remember, these are people who used to work manually without computers, then learned to use a Mac, and who are used to doing things a certain way. They aren't dumb though - actually they are great in improvising stuff in OS9, but OSX would simply break too many of their "shortcuts" to even be considered.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
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.
[quote]
Now, the interesting question is, how many people are still using 3.x on OS 9?
[/quote]
My father is the editor and publisher for four quarterly magazines. He has the latest Apple hardware, and uses OS 9 and Quark 3.32 exclusively. He'll never upgrade, and here's why: "If it aint broke, don't fix it".
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
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 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.
What did you eat for lunch?
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.