When Adobe introduced Creative Suite industry professionals were using QuarkXpress as their preferred layout program. Over the past few years as Adobe has been working hard to improve its offerings and as a result, on March 27, 2007 Creative Suite 3 was officially released. With Creative Suite 4 currently in development and expected to be released in late 2008 or early 2009, the offerings keep getting better and the features more rich.
Adobe Photoshop has been the preferred raster and photo manipulation software for both commercial and home users for many years. Users of the software have most likely learned the keyboard shortcuts, tips and tricks and more importantly spent hours and hours dwelling in tutorial books and websites. Needless to say, people are comfortable with Photoshop, and other Adobe products for that matter - they have invested hours and hours of their time.
With the first release of Adobe Creative Suite came the ‘new and improved’ Adobe InDesign (previous versions were 2.0, 1.5 and 1.0). Although, the software came with some bugs and quirks, and had significant issues with drop shadows and transparencies it was a step in the right direction. Right around the time InDesign CS was released (October 2003), many people were still using QuarkXpress version 5. When it came time to upgrade to QuarkXpress version 6.0 people hesitated. This is when InDesign started to take off. The hesitation stemmed from a couple reasons; cost, features, ease of use to name a few.
Many believe there are two primary reasons why InDesign started to become so popular shortly after its release; it was bundled with other software that was viewed as a necessity and people were familiar with similar products by Adobe. Most designers and industry-folk were comfortable with other Adobe products, the tools, techniques, shortcuts and the fact that they could maneuver around the menus quite quickly.
So designers and other industry professionals were asking themselves why they needed to spend, in some cases, double on QuarkXpress. After having used Quark for about 6 years and InDesign for about 4 years i clearly prefer InDesign.
With this said, will Quark make a comeback with version 8?
Version 8’s big claim to fame is the fact that it will have a new user interface and built-in Flash authoring. Which, in my opinion is somewhat odd seeing as how Flash is an Adobe product.
“We really sat down to change QuarkXPress and change the number of mouse clicks it takes to get things done,” Tim Banister, General Manager of Desktop Technology for Quark, told Macworld. “Really, we went back to the fundamentals.”
Beyond the interface and Flash capabilities, Quark 8 will feature a new Bézier pen tool for illustrating, drag and drop photos and text from Word, iPhoto, Adobe Bridge or any other software that supports drag and drop. The new version will also allow paragraph-by-paragraph control of hanging characters. Quark claims its new version is the only layout program with this capability.
I look forward to seeing the results and hearing the feedback.
