Quark to open office near Apple

If they invest more in R&D than other companies, why does their software suck? The only people who still use Quark over InDesign are people are or financially held hostage by Quark. The sooner quark dies, the better.

Not true. We willing use Quark. Awfully narrow-minded to wish that Quark would die, even for an InDesign user. Competition is good for both companies.

Quark moves close to Apple -hum- Like Michael Corleone said in the Godfather, keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.

But Quark truly sucks and has deserved the pounding it's market share has taken over the past few years.

A sloppy company with a sloppy product (stuck at version 4 for five years), who fired all their support people in Denver, started charging for tech support for the *most basic* issues, and hired low-wage Indians, whose new product releases are drubbed by reviewers and critics for being 'not there' yet. Release after release, the latest Quark is still one version behind Adobe InDesign.

I WISH it wasn't the case. While I abandoned Quack years ago to give Indesign 1.0 a shot, I agree competition is good, and I hate to see Adobe become a monopoly.

But Quark acted like one for years, until Adobe woke up and realized there was a whole base of dissatisfied Quack users who just wanted a program that played well with their OS, didn't slow their computers, and integrated with other products without requiring an act of Congress.

Too bad, Quack. You suck.

It's been three years since Adobe dropped FrameMaker for the Mac. Quark could have aggressively pursued the market void by putting some thought into making XPress elegantly handle long, structured (XML/XSLT), complex documents, while making it easier to use than FrameMaker. InDesign and XPress are horrible at handling long documents. So as a book publisher, my choices are LaTeX. Word, or dumping all my hardware for Windows (or Solaris--LOL) to run FrameMaker and spend big training bucks for FM's learning curve. But when they overhauled XPress in v6, Quark made a big deal about multiple page sizes in one document (oooh, you can store a fashion magazine cover and business card in the same document, and re-use library elements!), and being able to create Flash movies with QID, neither of which are no-brainer reasons to switch from InDesign. All they seem to be able to do is keep up with InDesign and their keep their locked-in customers who rely on Quark Xtensions and workflow. Considering InDesign's integration with other Adobe apps and its maturity into a decent layout program, it seems hopeless that Quark will ever pull XPress ahead of InDesign with the lead they had over Aldus/Adobe PageMaker in Quark's glory days.

After years of defending Quark over InDesign, I now have to admit Quark does suck ass and deserves the punch in the nose it has been getting. Due to my company having a name change, I have to friggin' call quark and deal with drones that barely speak english, and recite several ridiculously long codes (which did nothing to prevent it from being kracked BTW), every time I need to run a damn update! I still mostly use Quark 4 with Suitcase 8 because the combo is stable (even running in classic) and still blows away everything since in terms of raw speed! I won't give a crap about any of the new mangled features of InDesignCSx or Quark 6/7 until everyone has (or at least the Co. I work for has..) film/plate setters with rips that can actually handle them properly (Postscript Level3/transparency effects). Indesign is still dog slow with a crappy interface and left over PageMakerishness... And the 'integration' with other CS apps is KILLING ME (smart objects...NOT!)!!!. Sorry, but CS3 still isn't there yet, and in fact reminds me more of merger of Corel, Aldus, MacroMedia, and MultiAd (I've used them all)! Adobe most definitely needs the competition! Unfortunately Xpress hasn't been that for a long time now! They should have kept building on Quark 4 base, but 6+ seems like a different application all together and 7.x is a slower then dirt pain in the ass!