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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! :)
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
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
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.
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!
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!
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 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.
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....