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Graphics Businesses Software Apple

QuarkXPress 6 For Mac OS X 411

Posted by Hemos from the start-your-printing dept.
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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QuarkXPress 6 For Mac OS X More

QuarkXPress 6 For Mac OS X

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  • Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by krisp ( 59093 ) * on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:53PM (#6164782) Homepage
    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.

    • Not so fast.... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

    • Wait! (Score:5, Informative)

      by John Harrison ( 223649 ) <.johnharrison. .at. .gmail.com.> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:45PM (#6165277) Homepage Journal
      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.

      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?

  • Double-take? (Score:5, Funny)

    by captnjameskirk ( 599714 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:53PM (#6164783)
    Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores No, but I got whiplash when I saw the $899.95 pricetag! :)

  • This was (Score:5, Funny)

    by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <michaelmiller AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:54PM (#6164790) Journal
    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.

  • Flashback? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:54PM (#6164792)
    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.

  • quick fyi.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by greenskyx ( 609089 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:54PM (#6164793)
    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....

  • diablo II (Score:5, Funny)

    by iate138 ( 677385 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:54PM (#6164794) Journal
    sure, because i always equate decapitating the undead with aligning text! bring me the +5 ringlets of helvetica!

  • Too late for Quark... (Score:5, Informative)

    by drgroove ( 631550 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:55PM (#6164807)
    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.

    • Re:Too late for Quark... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by deadsaijinx* ( 637410 ) <animemeken@hotmail.com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:01PM (#6164875) Homepage
      can you prove that inDesign has gobbled up the marketshare? Seems to me that Quark still has quite the loyal base, especially since companies don't update their computers as compulsively as individuals.
    • 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.

    • Re:Too late for Quark... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether&tru7h,org> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:07PM (#6164938) Homepage
      > 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
    • Hmm... this is based on the assumption that most of the desktop pub market migrated to OSX. I don't have numbers, but the half dozen or so ad houses I know have stayed back at OS9 so they could run Quark, but YMMV.
    • InDesign hasn't gobbled up all of Quark's marketshare. There are a lot of companies out there who have QuarkXPress deeply entrenched in their workflow. I'm talking $millions to make the switch to InDesign.

      You have to remember that printing and publishing people are under hot deadlines. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

      In my opinion, this is more of a Good Thing to Apple than Quark.

    • I'll Never Buy A Quark Product (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:19PM (#6165066) Journal
      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.)

      • Re:I'll Never Buy A Quark Product (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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
      • Clearly they have put the XP in QuarkXPress.

    • Re:Too late for Quark... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:34PM (#6165190)
      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.

    • Re:Too late for Quark... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:46PM (#6165283) Journal
      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.

  • Important... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ciryon ( 218518 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:55PM (#6164809) Journal
    This is really important for Apple. There are extremely many professional Mac users in advertising and graphic production that still use OS9 just because of QuarkXPress.

    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 then they'll be behind again in a few months... Built for Mac OS X Jaguar

    • And if the 970 rumors are right, if they but wait another 30-180 days (depending on who's rumors you believe), they'll be in the perfect position.

      Coincidence that Quark is out now, rather than a month ago/two months from now? Oh, probably. But you still wonder....

  • deja vu (Score:3, Insightful)

    by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:56PM (#6164816)
    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!

  • Who cares? (Score:2, Informative)

    by haxor.dk ( 463614 )
    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?

  • Look out for bugs galore... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by artemis67 ( 93453 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:57PM (#6164828)
    That's why Quark is still selling QXP 4 alongside QXP 5.

  • I won't bother to RTFA (Score:5, Funny)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:58PM (#6164844)
    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.
    • 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

      It's also not a very good snow shovel. But it's a great desktop publishing program.

  • Trying it out now (Score:5, Funny)

    by pldms ( 136522 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @03:59PM (#6164848)
    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...
  • 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?

  • Important for Apple (Score:4, Interesting)

    by conan_albrecht ( 446296 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:01PM (#6164874)
    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.

  • For the Mac? (Score:4, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:03PM (#6164892) Homepage Journal

    Anyone else getting a flashback to when Diablo II was in stores?"

    For the Mac? Ohh two weeks ago.

  • Activation (Score:5, Informative)

    by MotownAvi ( 204916 ) <aviNO@SPAMdrissman.com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:04PM (#6164908) Homepage

    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 [quark.com] to deal with:

    No hardware key is required to activate your license, and you can upgrade your hardware up to five times before you are required to reactivate your QuarkXPress software. QuarkXPress will run for five days before activation is required. After this grace period expires, QuarkXPress goes into reduced functionality mode.

    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...

  • Don't expect widespread adoption now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ikewillis ( 586793 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:04PM (#6164910) Homepage
    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.

  • frome Apple's page:
    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?

    /background voice: this is a 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?)
  • When I saw this [macworldexpo.com] on the Macworld Expo website recently, I thought, "Huh... Quark still exists?"

    Guess it does :)

  • Delayed??? (Score:3, Informative)

    by CombatWombat ( 98078 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:08PM (#6164960)
    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.

  • does it cut it ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by z80 ( 103328 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:09PM (#6164962) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:does it cut it ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mrklin ( 608689 )
      Seriously. Apple could have gotten more switchers just by porting CounterStrike from way back then thorugh its 'Switch' ads. Too late.

    • Re:does it cut it ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:38PM (#6165217)
      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.

      Your I.T. 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 :-)

    • 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.

  • Special Bundle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:10PM (#6164973)
    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...

    • Re:Special Bundle (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Doctor O ( 549663 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:29PM (#6165151) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • Re:Special Bundle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by extrarice ( 212683 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:39PM (#6165226) Homepage Journal
      [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".
  • Quark 6 finally shipping. What's next, Duke Nukem Forever coming out next week?

  • Support for 64 bits? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jungle guy ( 567570 ) <[brunolmailbox-g ... ] [yahoo.com.br]> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:11PM (#6164989) Journal
    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...
    • I seriously doubt that Quark will EVER release a 64-bit version, at least not for a very long time. There just is no point. Does quark do a lot of high precision calculations? Does it need a more memory space than 32-bits provides? I doubt that its needs push a 32-bit system in any way that would make the change necessary. The gains that the rumored system would provide to Quark are related to memory bandwidth and are unlikely to be affected by the change to 64-bits.
      • 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.
    • Unlike Windows, where everything breaks ever service pack, or Linux, where stuff has to be ported to every combination of distribution kernel and libc version... I can take my NeXT code from ~1992 and compile it unchanged on OS X 10.2 becasue Apple does things right the first time.

      So I'm 100% sure compiling Quark for a G5 w/10.3 will just be a matter of hitting the build button.

  • nice recommended system requirements .. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jest3r ( 458429 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:13PM (#6165003)
    * Minimum: 128MB RAM, Recommended: 1024MB RAM .. My old Quark 4 recommended 12MB "for graphic intensive documents"

  • bad experiences with Quark (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elbanevretep ( 252029 ) <root@venabl e . mailshell.com> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:17PM (#6165046)
    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!

  • What will the REAL outcome be? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:18PM (#6165065) Journal
    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.

  • Support will be a nightmare (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dr.Evil ( 47264 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:23PM (#6165093) Homepage

    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!

    • Re:Support will be a nightmare (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:59PM (#6165407)
      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". :-(

  • Irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:24PM (#6165106) Homepage Journal
    Clearly, putting the word "express" in the name of the product reveals a sense of humor previously unsuspected at Quark... :-)
  • 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.

  • science fiction is becoming reality (Score:3, Funny)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:42PM (#6165260) Homepage Journal


    Whew. We crossed the millenium and I was worried when I didn't see flying cars and silver clothes in the stores. Were the movies of the 1930's over-anticipating the future?

    Now that Quark Xpress 6.0 is announced for Mac OS X, I'm regaining my faith that I'll have a robot that can make beer in unlimited quantities.

  • Symantec all over again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:49PM (#6165321)
    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....

  • hello, Quark? 2001 called... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jub ( 10089 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:58PM (#6165401) Homepage
    and they want their press release back.

  • Here's an Early Prediction about Quark/OS X. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:59PM (#6165411)
    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.

  • Flashbacks ? I should be so lucky (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @05:32PM (#6165698)
    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.

  • DVD Packaging (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Josuah ( 26407 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @05:53PM (#6165879) Homepage
    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.

  • Not Suprising That It Took So Long (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thedbp ( 443047 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @05:55AM (#6169259)
    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.

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