Thanks

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I think Quark’s coming around to the Suite way of thinking. Like I said earlier: it’s starting to give us its take on what I call the “Designer Envrionment”, giving the Quark user all the tools they will need to design and produce from within XPress without having to fire up some other company’s product. I understand that the QID interface has a familiar experience with QXP.

I’d further go out on a limb here and say that Quark is taking more than one page out of the Adobe book in that regard; the new palette arrangement reminds me of the way InDesign treats its palettes, and now you can get all your QXP functionality through palettes if you want–just like InDesign.

I don’t see that as a lack of originality on Quark’s part; their implementation is hardly a carbon-copy of the Adobe environment. But it does seem to be a riff off it. I think this is just Quark being smart.

when reading the press release and the reviews, then I think Quark doesn’t want Flash users to switch. It wants to attract the people who gave up on Flash, as they find it too difficult or need design features.

MacWorld gave Quark-ID 4 out of 5 stars and MacUser also 4 out of 5 mice. Here in Germany PAGE loved it too.

Maybe worth trying, I just haven’t gotten the nerve yet to download 400 MB.

Greetings
Martin

I can see it becoming popular with in-house deparments that are already using Quark. Since the additional cost is low compared to purchasing Flash. Sounds to me that it’s geared more torwards presentation-like flash rather than full-on animation. There are already many third party software that enables you to create Flash without learning Flash, and they are cheap too.

Still, I give Quark two thumbs up. They are a different company now. No longer resistant to advancement and the users.

I haven’t had the opportunity to try QID yet, but as a long time paid user of both XPress and the Adobe CS, I’ve got to say that Quark has what may be a valid survival strategy here.

One of the biggest drawbacks to Quark as it is is that if you want to design for the web and produce and edit drawings and graphics, you have to use another application. I always thought that Adobe was genius in making thier flagships look and feel the same and tying them together with Bridge, making them a unified environment.

I think if Quark wants to remain competitive it must try to make it, in some way, a development environment that allows its users to do what they want to do without feeling as though they are leaving the comfort of Quark. With the QuarkVista in V6.5 and PSD Import, they’re giving us thier take on the design environment.

Will QID play with users? We’ll know as soon as we can figure out how many people would rather use a Quark application to do Flash. It just might work, in as much as Quark seems to be taking a “giving you just want you’re wanting to have without going the whole hog” approach that they did with PSD Import.

My personal opinion though is that we’ll have to wait and see if this attempt to “steal Flash from under Adobe’s nose” is successful.