Can't say I blame you. Now's a great time to make the switch back.
Offer only good until January 31, 2010 (ie: tomorrow) - so you better act quick! :)
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You've GOT to be kidding.
Terrell Thornhill
e-zign Design Group
When a company starts giving their product away for free it means it's about to fail.
What about when a software company flies you to another country and buys you a PC just so you can run their operating system? :-)
Sorry, Art. I used to be a die-hard Quark user until forced with a project to jump into Adobe InDesign. Haven't looked back...
"Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised." - James Thurber
I quit Quark when they lagged 2 years behind the current OS. A couple of months after InDesign was released, I attended a designer's conference and attended Adobe's presentation of the (then) new InDesign. The audience of about 500 was quite blown away and gave a standing ovation. Then, it was Quark's turn.
Basically all Quark had to say was (and I'm paraphrasing), "Hey... You can now upgrade to Tiger AND export as a PDF!"
[insert cricket sound here]
It was beautiful. :)
Terrell Thornhill
e-zign Design Group
you know my feelings on this, art. quark shat on me one too many times to go back.
might find more takers on the adobe customer service thread... ;)
Doubt it. Adobe customer service may suck, but at least it exists! :)
Well it's extended to 28th of Feb ;-)
But ehm no I don't like Quark either. I'm happy other programs do exist though, like Quark and CorelDraw, Paintshop Pro, so there is a sort of competition and Adobe is forced to keep improving their software.
http://jackmancer.com/
http://twitter.com/jackmancer
definitely agree on that point. competition is good. i wish quark hadn't made such a mess of their program and their business. sounds like the program has improved significantly. but really, the problems we had with quark were probably due in no small part to the fact that they had little to no competition in the professional publishing world for so long. they got smug and arrogant and looked down their noses at the customer.
btw, art. didn't you bash adobe for "giving away" indesign in our earlier conversations?
Adobe flooded the market with free copies of InDesign - a program that wasn't selling by itself - thru sales of their other popular products like Photoshop and Illustrator. If you want a free copy of Quark - you have to buy a copy of Quark. Totally different idea. Especially when you consider Quark is supposedly dying (or already dead) according to some of the people in the thread here.
Alex - let us know when you confirm the existence of Adobe's customer service. We know Adobe has the phone lines for customer service and people answering those phones on occasion - just tell us when you get some actual customer service from the company.
your hate for adobe is even more amusing than my dislike for quark...
I hadn't appreciated the distinction - two messages and four phone calls later, I do.
So, to correct my earlier statement: "at least Adobe has thousands of phone numbers and a sprinkling of contact forms you can use in the hope that something will happen someday."
It's not easy being the trail blazer, gwells. A couple years from now when Adobe cancels InDesign for their next not-quite-as-good-as-Quark page layout program... you'll be thanking me.
oh, you can hold me to that one, art.
I still use quark everyday, it's what I learnt to use first and has always been my first choice. That may be down to my laziness of not wanting to learn another page layout programme when the one I use does everything I need, and is almost second nature.
living on dreams and custard creams.
Former Pagemaker user, switched to Quark eons ago and never looked back. If Adobe wants to give me a free copy of InDesign - I'll take a look at it. Otherwise, no reason to bother with it.
when I first started I used Pagemaker, using an old agfa imagesetter & firey RIP to output bromides to transfer into the darkroom, then camera the artwork up to size, process your film, plan it on acetate over a grid, then burn it onto plate. These kids don't know they are born!
I haven't found myself constricted by quark at all, I can get by in InDesign; but because I don't know it as well as quark, it is a chore. Indesign tries to be all things to all men, quark lays out pages. Well.
living on dreams and custard creams.
Yeah - it's like the old joke about geeks... the perfect program for a geek software designer would be the one that does everything. The only problem is the program would be so large you would never be able to start it up. That's Adobe in a nutshell - except their motive is money, not better software (which only makes the situation worse). But - to be fair - that's not why I don't use ID... I don't use it because there's no reason to. Why would I give up my Quark skill set for another program that does the exact same thing? I'd have to be either stupid OR under the spell of a first rate Adobe marketing plan. :-)
I had you pegged for a film guy when you gave somebody step-by-step instructions on how to run seps from Illustrator. Even most production people don't know how to do that (or at least they didn't back when I was running film). Do the words "Aldus PrePrint" mean anything to you? Just wondering...
haha,yeah. just when we got our first film imagesetter, and a 4 colour komori, CMYK was a revelation back then for me.
I've worked on presses, in pre-press, but my passion has always been design. I think I started on my Amiga using deluxe paint when I was about 7.
Working in pre-press has given me a great basis for practical advice I can offer my clients. Ganging up jobs for instance, you can take $$$'s off a campaign by paying by sheet. I've got a pneumatic guillotine, so I impose lots of jobs together, and trim myself if I have enough business that week.
I bought a swann-morten scalpel the other day, and a pack of 10A blades, it's a joy to use. Brings back memories.
You'll be bringing up the red tape next.
living on dreams and custard creams.
as far as im concerned, adobe consistently makes the best production tools out there. and ive never had a problem with their customer service - aside from the fact that they (like about 80% of similar companies) ship most of it overseas...
Not counting InDesign... my opinion of Adobe is they make the second best production tools out there (Apple being #1) but Adobe ruins all of them with program bloat and other bad corporate decisions based on money. Their customer service is aimed at people who've been in the business for a short time. Ask them anything other than "How do I load this program" and you'll never get an answer - instead you'll get their standard dodge "We'll have a technician call you back when we have an answer." 20+ years in the business - I've never received a single call back from Adobe.
I too started on Quark ages ago... Quark 3 vs the current Quark 8, you can definitely see the progression (although with v8, you can clearly seeing how Quark "borrow" some interface ideas from InDesign).
I'm mainly on InDesign these days AND that is not because I hate Quark...rather we have an archive system that apparently suck at handling Quark files. I see both apps as tools only, hence don't have preference over either...it's whatever that gets the job done most efficiently and painlessly.
InDesign vs Quark, each has it's own strengths and weak points. While InDesign was gaining market share by giving it out free, Quark was shooting itself in the foot with weak upgrades like v5 that gave Adobe a chance to gain grounds on them. Looks to me Adobe made the same mistake with a pointless upgrade of Indy CS4.
Adobe does have a slight edge over Quark...cheaper pricing helps especially these days everyone are trying to cut cost.
Agree with everything you said except the last line. A couple hundred dollars (or even a couple thousand) aren't going to make a difference when you're talking about a program you'll be using everyday for the next few years. That's the same as the Mac vs. PC price "issue" - hardware and software is not the place to be looking to save a couple dollars imho.
A dollar saved is another number that will look good on balance sheet for bean counters.
Actually it's not the same as Mac vs PC, ten years ago this was true, but these days every design/prepress/printing that can be done on a Mac can also be perform on a PC quiet well these days. The only reason Mac still dominates in publishing/printing industry is mainly because most design schools only teach computer skills on Macs.
Again, knowing your "tools", applying it well and efficiently should be the emphasis not brand loyalty.
"Again, knowing your "tools", applying it well and efficiently should be the emphasis not brand loyalty."
Agree. The same thought applies when it comes to saving a few dollars at the cash register. Making a purchasing decision that will affect you for YEARS should not be based on saving $100 at the cash register. You have to look beyond making the bean counters happy and consider things like... Macs last longer... study after study shows Mac users are more productive... and - as you stated yourself - Mac still dominates the publishing/printing industry. So the bottom line is you will make that $100 back and then some over the life of the "tools" if you make the proper software/hardware decision. The key to saving is long term - not short term.