If you want a more designer-friendly environment, look toward Quark and InDesign. At present, InDesign is your best bet, as Sam suggested. It handles long documents and book design quite well (I’ve personally used both it and Quark [version 4.1] for book production).

As Janes notes, Quark 7 might be a competitive choice, but no one who can talk about it has seen it. It hasn’t been shown to members of the press without a non-disclosure agreement. And, at the moment, we have only the word of people like Janes who use apparently throw-away e-mail addres at free services like Yahoo and GMail to fervently spread vague and unquantified propoganda about it.

If you’re looking for layout software that involves books including artwork, I’d go for InDesign and the Creative Suite. No other program at this time handles graphics so well; transparency is recognized in TIFFs, so no clipping paths are necessary, and you can use PSDs and AI files natively, without the need for conversion.

Quark has come up with free XTensions that provide native PSD Import, and the new QuarkVista XTension allows for inline non-destructive image adjustments. PSD Import is good, and QuarkVista is good…QuarkVista is quite a resource hog though.

Anyone else care to chime in on this?

I’m somewhat familiar with your viewpoint on Apple’s software evolution, and I’d say that Fleishman’s view vindicates yours to a great degree. If we accept that Apple and Adobe are now very close to being peers, it only makes sense that Apple will try to steal some of Adobe’s thunder. I remember the loss of bonhomie between the two companies that made news..what was it, about a year and a half ago?

Since you mentioned, I have had the opportunity to see Pages. It was an interesting thing to try to use. It seems to be largely something more rich than Word but less rich than Publisher or PageMaker. Like a word processor that wants to be page layout when it grows up. Could this be the beginning of an app to go up against InDesign (if I read Fleischman correctly, it certainly wouldn’t be competing with Quark…or would it?)

Moreover, Apple may be of the opinion that they have a product that could go up against Photoshop…but would that be a reasonable thing for Apple to assume? PS seems more entrenched in more consituencies than even Quark was.

Also, I hear a great deal about Core Image, but I just don’t have enough minutes in the day to chase down exactly what that means or why I should care. Could you define that?

Over the din of angry Macolytes I’ve been saying for two years now that Apple is targeting Adobe and other application developers on whose products Mac sales are largely dependent. As I’ve reported in the past, Apple is developing or has developed competing products in most of the markets that directly affect Mac hardware and OS sales. One application at a time, they are moving to supplant the dominance of MS Office, for example.

Two years ago I predicted Pages, Motion, iWork, and Tiger’s Core Image, though, as will undoubtedly echo following this comment, the blindly Mac-loyal shouted me down (even when other analysts plagiarized me).

For 18 months now Apple has had a fully functional competitor to Photoshop. I haven’t seen it, nor do I know its capabilities compared with Photoshop CS or CS2, but apparently Apple feels it’s ready to roll, according to a source inside Apple. The impending Adobe-Macromedia merger has undoubtedly pushed back the timeframe for crossing that particular point-of-no-return. Core Image is Steve Jobs toeing the line.