Briefly: Quark 7 on May 23; exec options; more
QuarkXpress 7 due this month
While Quark is gathering the European press for a QuarkXPress 7 launch event at the Congress Centre in London on June 2, it actually plans to first debut the major desktop publishing software upgrade in the United States this month.
The Denver, Colorado company will host an invitation-only special event at The Puck Building in New York City on May 23 to formally unveil QuarkXPress 7, which has been in public beta for several months.
Quark promises the event to include "special sessions, special speakers, and special surprises." It will kick-off with a keynote by Jürgen Kurz, the company's senior vice president of product management.
QuarkXPress 7 will be a Universal Binary application capable of running natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. It will include a slew of new features such as new transparency tools, picture effects enhancements, SD import enhancements, composite zones and content sharing tools.
Fadell, Johnson exercise options
Members of Apple's executive team continued this month to cash in on the company's success.
Between May 1st and May 3rd, newly appointed iPod chief Tony Fadell exercised 45,437 stock options -- including 3500 owned by his wife -- to cash in on a cool $3.2M.
According to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fadell paid between $10.19 and $10.89 for the options, which he sold at market values between $71.11 and $71.38.
A day later, Apple's retail boss Ron Johnson exercised a total of 150,000 company stock options, reaping over $10.7M. Johnson paid $23.78 for the options, which he disposed of at market values between $72.00 and $72.28.
Following the sales, Fadell and Johnson retained 577 and 149,890 shares of Apple common stock, respectively.
Apple closes down OS X for Intel
In fear of software pirates, Apple has closed down the Intel version of Mac OS X, according to a report.
"Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code," TomÂ*Yager wrote for InfoWorld. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."
While Yager notes that Apple has only shipped client systems where users care little about openness, he notes the company soon "will break out Intel variants of the kinds of machines [...] namely, servers and workstations."
While Quark is gathering the European press for a QuarkXPress 7 launch event at the Congress Centre in London on June 2, it actually plans to first debut the major desktop publishing software upgrade in the United States this month.
The Denver, Colorado company will host an invitation-only special event at The Puck Building in New York City on May 23 to formally unveil QuarkXPress 7, which has been in public beta for several months.
Quark promises the event to include "special sessions, special speakers, and special surprises." It will kick-off with a keynote by Jürgen Kurz, the company's senior vice president of product management.
QuarkXPress 7 will be a Universal Binary application capable of running natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. It will include a slew of new features such as new transparency tools, picture effects enhancements, SD import enhancements, composite zones and content sharing tools.
Fadell, Johnson exercise options
Members of Apple's executive team continued this month to cash in on the company's success.
Between May 1st and May 3rd, newly appointed iPod chief Tony Fadell exercised 45,437 stock options -- including 3500 owned by his wife -- to cash in on a cool $3.2M.
According to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fadell paid between $10.19 and $10.89 for the options, which he sold at market values between $71.11 and $71.38.
A day later, Apple's retail boss Ron Johnson exercised a total of 150,000 company stock options, reaping over $10.7M. Johnson paid $23.78 for the options, which he disposed of at market values between $72.00 and $72.28.
Following the sales, Fadell and Johnson retained 577 and 149,890 shares of Apple common stock, respectively.
Apple closes down OS X for Intel
In fear of software pirates, Apple has closed down the Intel version of Mac OS X, according to a report.
"Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code," TomÂ*Yager wrote for InfoWorld. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."
While Yager notes that Apple has only shipped client systems where users care little about openness, he notes the company soon "will break out Intel variants of the kinds of machines [...] namely, servers and workstations."
Comments
I mean yay for competition and all, but these locked formats have to go.
i just hope, for anyone still using quark, that they didn't rush it to market because of the intel thing. otherwise, it might be a beta-mess.
I can justify the cost of InDesign, and if this version of Quark is exceptional, I might justify the cost of Quark, but I can't justify both just to be able to open files of the other.
Anyone who has encountered an "end of file" error knows what I mean.
If all software were free, though, I'd use Quark in a second. It's not a matter of "archaic" printers sticking to Quark, it's simply that it's a better tool for getting the job done well. To make one example, InDesign is absolutely worthless for doing any sort of alpha layering -- it's so bad, that the feature may as well not even be there. Despite its quirks, Quark does a good job at everything it allows you to do, and does so on a tight, fast-running code-base. InDesign is a bloated nightmare.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
InDesign is a bloated nightmare.
that's an interesting comment.
Fortunately, the people at my last job, which was working as a designer for a top-20 newspaper, didn't think like that.
You see, we came from *years* of putting up with what we lovingly dubbed "Quirk."
InDesign was a such a boost to our production it was ridiculous...the improvements of scripting alone were worth it... I'd also like to say that with InDesign there were very, very few bizarre "Quirk"-like problems. The problems that did present themselves were easily solved. Whereas, with "Quirk" we just had to deal.
My favorite issue with Quirk was it's bizarre refusal to sometimes send certain color plates through our RIP...So consistent as to be nightmarish at times. Even better would be its selective refusal to send certain elements of certain plates through the RIP. Nothing better than comping a $50,000 ad because your software f*cks the process up...
ps: You *are* joking about InDesign & alpha layering, right? Surely you *must* be talking about Quark?
It's nice that you worked for a top-20 newspaper, but as far as using a layout tool at its graphic design limits, a newspaper isn't going to stress it much. Newspaper is a fairly low resolution medium whose design principles haven't really changed much in years. If you disagree, then it seems we must read different newspapers. I have no expertise in the areas of separating, publishing, etc, and I don't care about that aspect, since it's not my problem.
I don't think that Quark is necessarily better than InDesign, and if I can avoid raster clipping it's certainly better than Quark for what I do. Perhaps you've had luck with alpha layers in InDesign, but as far as I can tell they have the same, marginal algorithm that's used for Illustrator's autotrace. Even when I have alpha masks that work great in Photoshop, I get major artifacts at the image edges when I mask it within InDesign. The results are so bad that I can't even use alpha masks: I have to make sure to take the extra time to pen-in paths in Photoshop, then import the path layer with the PSD. It's a terribly closed process and I hate it. I also hate the fact that InDesign can't do synchronized text, nor does it have an elegant way to handle section headers/footers. The Master page system alone just doesn't cut it.
Fortunately, I don't have to use these features very often, so there's not a really compelling reason for me to get Quark. Quark is not as good at dealing with the vast amounts of vector graphics I usually throw at it (or at InDesign) I also appreciate the fact that InDesign has an excellent PDF exporter. I just get a little curious why people are always so pessimistic about Quark, when at the end of the day it has been eight years and InDesign still lacks the panache that Quark had in version 3.