Quark 6.5 released

Yeah, it's a cheap substitute for ID. The image editing feature is a disaster waiting to happen, the .psd import feature is nice, but not as fluid as ID - it still has crappy previews of .eps images until you make a high res preview (which slows you down) and it can't import .ai files directly. Type on a path is still a joke, convert fonts to paths is still a joke, you still can't stroke type, STILL NO TRANSPARENCY!!!

Quark just doesn't get it. People have been asking for these things for years, and yet the choose to ignore their customers.

Don't get me wrong, there are several things I still like about Quark. At first I thought the idea of multiple page sizes in one document was a bad idea, but now I can see the incredible time saver it is and I love it. I like the speed of Quark, but it comes at the cost of having far less "design" features and louzy and completely inaccurate image previews.

I rarely open Quark anymore, because I switched to InDesign upon its release a few years ago. It was rough being an ID user during the 1.0 and 1.5 versions, but once 2.0 came out, things started changing in the industry and ID started gaining ground... QUICK!

Now "the switch is on," so to speak, and large companies are moving to InDesign by the boat load. Ad agencies are switching and virtually every decent print shop in the country accepts ID files without question.

If Quark would only focus on what their users want, instead of silly-assed built in image editors and HTML building capabilities, they would be doing themselves a favor.

MacGizmo wrote:

If Quark would only focus on what their users want, instead of silly-assed built in image editors and HTML building capabilities, they would be doing themselves a favor.

That and the now dead QuarkImmedia has set the company back about 3 to 4 years of useable development. Feature for feature, Quark now finds itself playing catch-up with ID... reminds me of the relationship between 2 competing OS developers. :wink:

i hope Quark gets it's act together, because it would be sad to see such an old friend slowly die out. also, Adobe needs competition to be on the edge.

PS has nearly no competition anymore. i don't want ID to be in the same situation in 2 years.

Quote:

PS has nearly no competition anymore. i don't want ID to be in the same situation in 2 years.

I couldn't disagree more. Photoshop is the pinnacle of applications. Its feature list has grown with every release, it remains the single most stable app on the entire platform, even though it is probably the largest, most complex app available.

Photoshop not having any real competition hasn't hurt the end-user at all in my opinion. They've even lowered the price over the years.

On the other side of the coin, if you look at Freehand and Illustrator, both apps suck in one form or another. They are forced to play "one-upmanship" with each other, and as a result, both apps are bloated, buggy and have strayed so far away from their main identity that many pros avoid them. And lets face it, with Photoshop & InDesign including bezier/vector path tools, type on path and a few other features right inside the app, the need for AI or FH is far less than what it used to be.

it's true that there are benefits of being comfortably alone in a business. taking your time and not being forced to implement useless features that your competitor offers.