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Quark 6 Alpha

Someone mentioned $ 700 for Quark 4? Here in Europe it cost more than $ 2000!!! as a soft- hard- ware reseller I received last week a mail from one of my suppliers stating that the price for Express will go up next week by 5%, I could not believe what I was reading.

Here in Holland not even one advertising agency (I know of) works with OSX because there is no Express version for it, Indesign is not even considered an option, people here are very scared to try something new. sales of PowerMac's will continue dropping here as no one has a need for quicker computers most have G4 (400-733mhz) which work just fine for Mac OS9.
 
Originally posted by Jays
Someone mentioned $ 700 for Quark 4? Here in Europe it cost more than $ 2000!!! as a soft- hard- ware reseller I received last week a mail from one of my suppliers stating that the price for Express will go up next week by 5%, I could not believe what I was reading.
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Welcome to what Japanese has been dealing with for a long, long time... Quark has a nerve to charge appox. $2500US for Version 4.1J without any Xtensions or high quality Japanese fonts like InDesign 2. (BTW, the price for InDesign 2 in Japan is about $765US - less than 1/3!). I have a high hope that the industry will switch to InDesign soon despite the recession there. I have seen some encouraging signs - I heard that the most of design and DTP schools there already switched, so did many high-profile design houses and publishers. Of course, smaller companies will have to stick with Quark and OS9 for a time being, but they will switch soon or later. One thing is for sure - they will not likely purchase Quark 6 for OS X, as they will not replace the hardware AND pay Quark's ridiculous prices.
 
Same here in AUstralia...sick to death of hearing about how Ive gotta know Quark or I cant get work anywhere...%$*# that! I will use the best tools I can lay my hands on..and when quark is charging 3000 odd dollars (AU) for their chunk of s*$t no way...hmmmphh...

just my 2c....sorry
 
Originally posted by Jays
Someone mentioned $ 700 for Quark 4? Here in Europe it cost more than $ 2000!!! as a soft- hard- ware reseller I received last week a mail from one of my suppliers stating that the price for Express will go up next week by 5%, I could not believe what I was reading.
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Ah, the wonders of Passport pricing. In Europe and other places in the world, you have to pay 3 times as much for Quark, to support your native language and presets. And, wow, you can change the language within the app (hmm, sounds like something OS X supports natively...)

It's a shame the poll option have been pulled. Who here at this forum belives Quark will ship XPress 6 before 2010? And it's not even going to be a Cocoa app!!! Why even bother... blah...
 
Originally posted by Choppaface
it would be interesting if macromedia bought quark, though I don't think they have much of a footing in the print biz
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Macromedia does have Freehand, Illustrator's main competition.

I have such mixed feelings about Quark. On one hand, I am tired of these ridiculously long product cycles. They add features which no one wants or needs (i.e. HTML export) or badly implemented features like their table tool. On the other hand. I am very fast and profitable in Quark which ad agencies apppreciate. Now, I have nothing against InDesign but Quark will have its place on my hard drive, mostly because of the gigabytes of old jobs in Quark 3 and 4 which need to be accessed, edited and output. InDesign's conversion ability has yet to impress me.

I think Macromedia buying Quark would be great for all involved. MM gets an app they can expand their presence in the print world with and Quark gets an infusion of cash, coders and an excellent help desk.
 
Creator is Good!

Creator is a much better product than a certain poster's rather limited test drive suggests. SUI? Obviously said poster does not understand Creator's origins or core market, which is the newspaper advertising world. Had it ever occured to you that default sizes could be whatever you want them to be? I really laugh my butt off listening to these quick glance "reviews" of software from folks whom obviously went in with a bias to begin with! I would think that "Mac" people would be a little more open minded. InDesign comes across as bloatware, but I would seriously consider it part of my workflow as an open minded Mac user, but I must tell you that Creator has a strong following in the small to medium sized publishing companies (meaning newspaper and shopper publishers), in fact I now of several dailies and weekly newspapers and shopping guides that use Creator for part or all of their workflow. Creator allows for easily placing elements (like starbusts and all kinds of polygons, type manipulation and so on) much easier than the traditional "desktop publishing" programs like InDesign, PageMaker or QuarkXPress. Also, Creator has a very straight forward, easy to use and powerful method for making color separation plates.
 
Originally posted by chewbaccapits
wouldn't it be great if a majority of apple users decided to boycott quark! I know I will...You with me men?
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I boycotted quark when InDesign 1.0 came out, everyone laughed at me, looks who is laughing now. :D
 
Same here, aharon. Same here. I do feel bad for a lot of folks who are stuck using Quark. I'm not so naive to say that ID is perfect, but once you get behind the wheel of ID, what a smooth drive it is compared to (hack, cough) Quark.
 
Bring out your dead.....

When OS 9 died, it took Quark Express with it.
Hey look, they had the opportunity and they blew it.
Bye Bye Quark. Don't let the door hit you in the @ss! :p
 
Wait. Wait. Wait. No offense, all, but let's get back on the original topic: That Quark must die a fiery death, with their headquarters building imploding and the head honchos running tarred and feathered from the building!

FOCUS, people, FOCUS! :D
 
ID2 drawbacks

Originally posted by mangoman
Same here, aharon. Same here. I do feel bad for a lot of folks who are stuck using Quark. I'm not so naive to say that ID is perfect, but once you get behind the wheel of ID, what a smooth drive it is compared to (hack, cough) Quark.
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I'd love to use ID2 more, but it's really too slow, excruciatingly so, on a 450mHz G4. Quark in Classic is much faster, though dealing with its redraw bugs (Yes, I have ClassicDraw XT) and inability to properly handle long filenames, takes time and is a pain as well. The slowness of my company's transition to OSX (I'm the only print artist that is running it) assures me that we'll be Quarkbound for the foreseeable future. In any case, choice is always a good thing...

Alpha?!! If 10 monkeys typed 10 lines of code every 10 minutes, could they write a Cocoa Quark in 10 years?...
 
Monkeys

Originally posted by jayscheuerle

If 10 monkeys typed 10 lines of code every 10 minutes, could they write a Cocoa Quark in 10 years?...
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WAIT! Maybe this IS their plan! So let's see, when would that put their release date? OSX has been out for over a year, so... 2012?

Of course, if they only have 5 monkeys...
 
Quark is dead

Quark is dead,

I been using InDesign for a while and send jobs out to my printers. told them I'm using InDesign for now on and they said no problem. So the switching is on.

"My name is Wash...and I'm a (quark)switcher":D
 
People don't want to switch from Quark to InDesign for the same reason they don't want to switch from OS 9 to OS X... they won't embrace new technology, they're too scared or Quark has like one feature they just can't live without.

Personally I think after using both Quark and InDesign, they both suck.
 
Not so simple...

Originally posted by bryank1
People don't want to switch from Quark to InDesign for the same reason they don't want to switch from OS 9 to OS X... they won't embrace new technology, they're too scared or Quark has like one feature they just can't live without.

Personally I think after using both Quark and InDesign, they both suck.
Click to expand...

Most people aren't switching because:

1) If it ain't broke...
2) Hardware is too old to run ID2 smoothly
3) Industry standard (still)
4) Ignorance
5) They prefer Quark

I've played with ID2 on my own time & wouldn't mind switching over at work (in spite of the speed hit), but other people within the company need to open my files. None of these other are even running OSX yet & they're happy (not afraid) running what they're running because they don't know any better. Most have not even heard of InDesign. Not everybody out there is a MacRumors member... -j
 
Re: Quark not that Wealthy

Originally posted by jccbin
Word is that Quark only sold abut 10-15K copies of 5.x. They sold nearly 125K copies fo 4.x, for comparison.

Quark is a privately-held company so it cannot raise money the same way a company like GE, MSFT, or AAPL can, by selling stock. Quark can raise money by bringing in addition investors, going public (not), or by getting loans against future products or current assets.

Think about those sales figures:

Even if EVERY copy of Xpress 5.x they sold was at full retail price (NO UPGRADES), they would only bring in $10.5 Million (15,000 X $700).

More likely, they sold abut half for full price ($5.25 million) and half for upgrade (7,500 X $300 = $2.25million) for $7.5 million GROSS income on a two-to-four year time investment. Not a lot of dough to pay folks with if the company is paying off its debts, investors and the like.

Quark might be in real danger of going under for good. BTW, those sales figures came from reports at that recent Quark meeting where Quark Pres/CEO Fred Ibrahimi made those "Mac Market is shrinking" statements and told the Mac Quark users to move over to something else if they didn't like the pace Quark was moving. So, I can't say the numbers are solid, but they are probably in the ballpark.
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This might not be as bas as it sounds. Quarks largest customers tend to be slow to upgrade, often takeing a 1-2 years after a major version release to adopt it on a large scale. I work in book publishing. We have yet to upgrade, and none of our clients have asked us to use it either. Even if we did start installing it today, it would take up to a year to get the majority of our projects switched over (we wouldnt switch a job in mid production, and some books have production runs of 6-12 months or more). If you looked at historical sales figures for the Quark 3.32 to 4 move they are probably fairly similar given the timeframe since 5.0 was introduced (I know that my company was still buying 3.32 from any source we could find 18-24 months after Quark 4 was introduced). Add into it the Quark 6/OS X question and its is amazing that Quark has sold any copies of 5.0.
 
Originally posted by bryank1
People don't want to switch from Quark to InDesign for the same reason they don't want to switch from OS 9 to OS X... they won't embrace new technology, they're too scared or Quark has like one feature they just can't live without.

Personally I think after using both Quark and InDesign, they both suck.
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Quark is a better production tool than InDesign. It is more streamlined, and screen redraws are a lot faster. InDesign's pdf flattening breaks some OPI workflows, so priinting takes longer. In a large scale production house this can add a lot of time and expense to the production of a book. (How many people out there have built a complicated document in InDesign with 20 pages? From what I've seen I could do it in Quark 3.32 on a 400 mhz G3 faster than on my dual 1Ghz using InDesign, I may be exadurating a little but not by much)

Indesign is a better design tool than Quark. You have better previews, and more power to composit graphics into the document.
 
Why Quark is taking so long....

Quark is taking a long time to release a new product for several reasons. Fred has been busy laying off his American staff to move programming to India. http://www.quarkindia.com Any time you kill of development staff and hire new people your product is going to take longer to get out. I don't know that every body is gone from Denver, but there have been lot's of lay offs.
 
quark are you reading any of this?!

quark are you reading any of this?! i hope someone over there is paying attention, because as you can see by the posts today and many previous ones your circling the drain. even the die-hard qx fans are slowly, but surely moving on.

if there's one thing i've learned on this technological band wagon, you gotta hold on tight. if you fall off, you'd better get back on fast! id has brought many things the graphics field has been asking for, for a long time and is getting better and better. let's face it, no program or hardware will ever be perfect and i think that's the point, so we keep upgrading of course. with quarks attitude though, they should soon fall by the wayside. so, thanks for the memories quark and thank you adobe for provding a wonderful product that's getting better and better :)
 
This sinking feeling....

Quark 6 is going to come out with essentially the same feature set as 5, but aquafied. They'll probably toss in some web-specific features that the publishing world could care less about. At this point, a true mass exodus will occur to ID2 because hope will have been lost. If Quark's going to take this much time, something great better come out of them other than just an ultra-stable, native version of Xpress5. Frankly, I don't think they have the creativity to step up with the types of features that ID2 has. Quark has always had that feeling like it was designed by and for engineers or CAD people.

It has no soul...
 
Quark 5 DOES support OS X!

Just Look!

Quark announces support for Apple's Mac OS X

DENVER - September 1, 1998 - In a continued effort to develop software for all the most popular operating systems, Quark Inc. today announced that it will include support for Apple's upcoming operating system, Mac OS X (ten), in its next release of QuarkXPress. Quark will also show its support by participating in Steve Jobs' opening keynote at the Seybold San Francisco conference September 1-3, 1998.


Check it out!

You could've knocked me over with a feather!:rolleyes:
 
Originally posted by @HomeNow
(How many people out there have built a complicated document in InDesign with 20 pages? From what I've seen I could do it in Quark 3.32 on a 400 mhz G3 faster than on my dual 1Ghz using InDesign, I may be exadurating a little but not by much)
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LOL. That's funny. If you could see the complex InDesign docs I've been shipping off to a variety of printers for the past 2 years, you might be impressed. Who knows, maybe you wouldn't. FWIW, I've sent several docs in the past year, a few of which were over a hundred pages (data planners) which included transparencies. The prepress guys and I talked before hand and, although they were a little squeamish, the job ripped fine. Recently sent another funky job to press: 72 pager, transparencies, spot plates, etc. Again, no sweat. I have a couple of colleagues who have sent twice as much InD material than I have.

Look, I'm not saying it's perfect. But on a daily, practical basis, as someone who's been using Quark for over five years and InD for two, I'll take InDesign anyday. Period (<-- oops. prepare for flame war!)

OK. Enough from me, for now.

Flame away, Quark slaves!

:D
 
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