Quark 6.1 For Mac
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. 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.
Quark 6.1 For Mac Mac
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.
Adobe's inDesign has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare, since it has had OSX presence for over a year now. You're failing to account for all the older prepress houses that pretty much cut their teeth using quark, and are still lagging behind using older installs that the last version ran on. It's been years since I've had any contact with this industry but I know these people, this is how they work. Once they fixate on a given piece of software, that's all they use. The arguments of the virtues between pagemaker and quark got downright nasty sometimes. A lot like the unix vi/emacs debate.
I think this new release will do just fine. Yeah the impact won't be as big as it could have been, but it's hardly to the point that quark is doomed. Though true that this is how many design houses work, I can say that it's unnecessary. My publication had been working on quark for its entire Electronic Life, and we converted over to InDesign for X. There was grumbling at first, but nobody would consider going back to Quark now. It took about 2 weeks to get back up to speed on an 80-100 page weekly publication.
It was an easy, easy transition. The questions that will really define Quark's continued success in the marketplace are: 1) Will it work; 2) if it. Just a few days ago, I installed Quark (on a Windows 2000 machine) that was destined to be on the desk of a desktop publishing person at the company where I work.
Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat (full version,) Illustrator and a bunch of others were to be installed as well. 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.). I previewed the final candidate for Mac OS X a couple of weeks ago, and I'm sad to say that it's not getting any better. It requires you to put in everything imaginable about who you are and where you work. I don't think it asked about your salary, but I don't remember much after I started hammering in bogus info. I don't understand in the first place why, because it's software, or because it's an online service, we're expected to fork over so much info about ourselves these days. I have.already paid. for.
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 altmuehlnet.de and I just installed it here on my FreeBSD box. Pretty screen shots atlanticte.utions.com. 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 o. Quark made a.huge.
mistake by taking this long to get to OSX. Quark has.problems. I worked at quark back in the late 90s. And believe it or not, they had internal versions of XPress running on Max OSX back then - not Aqua versions, but running versions of XPress nonetheless.
The thing is.they fired everyone. Shortly after I left, I found out that the company fired nearly every one of it's most knowledgable developers. Senior staff. People who wrote the original XPress code. And then, a few years ago, Tim Gill sold his share to his partner, Fred Ibrahimi. And that was pretty much it for the Quark software developer.
Tim was responsible for feeding and care of the techies, so to speak, and when he left, I know that a lot of people were concerned for their jobs. For kicks, I just took a look at the Quark jobs webpage. Turns out, they have two jobs available in Denver - one product management, and one product analyst. However, they have nearly 20 jobs available in Quark India.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Quark's mismanagement of it's technical staff is what has led to these abysmal release schedules, and they don't seem to be getting any better. It's kind of a shame. Quark was a fun company. Don't agree with the overall theme of your message-Quark f.cked up bigtime, they got lazy with their near monopoly of desktop publishing software and is a bad spot now. But to say it 'has effectively gobbled up all of the old Quark marketshare' is absolutely false.
Totally disregarding the huge number of shops that don't change because they don't have to (unlike computers geeks who upgrade for fun) the vast number of Quark XTensions are a huge factor too. Is there a replacement for www.kytek.com's AutoPage, for instance? I think for the non-professional Adobe has probably done an amazing job of dominating quark-but there is a large portion of the market that hasn't switched, and isn't able to. Print houses and others in the preprint industry dependent on QuarkXPress for business (and therefore currently on OS 8/9) are unlikely to convert to OS X in the near term. This will be a threefold issue:. Those wary of change will be unwilling to switch to the new operating system.
Similarly, there are those who are wary of changing to a new application following a release, because they are scared of bugs which won't be found through regression testing and won't see the light of day until the product sees widespread public use. And last but certainly not least, the problem which will hold back those who actually want to change: plugins 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. I can't comment on how hard it is to upgrade a graphics application, but I use to do desktop support for both Mac's and PC's and I still help out some with support. People are idiots! I was personally responsible for supporting over 700 macs and had little to no problem doing it. Now the Microsoft people will say that they can do that, but I try to remind them that if you have an SMS person, NT/Active Directory Admin person AND a desktop support person, that counts as THREE PEOPLE.
Don't even get me started on viruses and other security issues. I just spent part of this week fixing that @$%@# bugbear virus. (Didn't touch our GroupWise users or Macs though.) Supporting windows is a pain. The ONLY thing that makes it 'easy' is that you know that most companies have drivers and software for it. But guess what. They may not have one for XP, or whatever new Microsoft OS is out.
So when you order your 'new' machine from Dell you might have to DOWNGRADE the OS just to run your apps. Then you usually find that they don't have an older OS driver for your hardware. 99% of the world isn't windows. Granted I type this from a Win2k box:-). Quark Xpress has been announced for OS X 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. For the most part, Quark threw a party and NOBODY showed up 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. 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. 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. 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. No knock against Indian developers in general, but Quark has not adopted a 'best programmer rupees can buy' mentality there That's the understatement of the century - there are certainly perfectly good Mac developers in India (as there are pretty much anywhere), but I doubt they're working for Quark. A large number of professional Mac developers subscribe to Apple's carbon-dev mailing list. Quark's Indian developers post there regularly, and although they're not quite at the 'so, which button do I press to compile?' Level they're not far off it.
Some of the questions they've asked show a basic lack of knowledge of Mac programming, or programming in general to be frank (e.g., refusing to do even basic research to understand sample code/docs, and insisting the list help them out instead). Posting anonymously since I've no desire to start more noise than there is already on that list. But from the outside, it looks like a textbook example of 'let's outsource development to the cheapest bidder'.:-(. 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. There will be a problem. 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. 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. 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. 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. While this has been said, comparing PS and Xpress is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Think of the your standard google.com, google.com, google.com 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. 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. Actually, it sucks quite a bit less.
There are very big differences between LaTex, Word, etc - same differences between a shareware photo-retouching program and Photoshop. 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. 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 c.