Macworld: Quark talks open standards, InDesign ...

Of course, they never mention what applications actually understand the QuarkXPress schema, which suggest to me such applications are few and far between. You'd think if there was anything to brag about they'd do a little name dropping.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who has stability problems with Xpress. Since upgrading to 6.5, Collect For Output invariably crashes the program. So I have to do it manually. With more than a few fonts and images this work-around is not feasible. Rather than spend countless hours troubleshooting the problem I have moved almost exclusively to InDesign.

Speaking of InDesign, it has, naturally enough, been moving toward seamless integration with other Adobe applications. CS 2 continues this trend in a big way. Personally, this is far more valuable than an XML workflow. Anyone who uses a page layout program to build web pages, or a database, needs their head examined, anyway. Of course, now that Adobe has acquired Macromedia, the possibilities do multiply.

Still, these differences in focus for XPress and InDesign do begin to distinguish the programs. For certain environments no doubt XPress is a better choice. For others, it's InDesign. The areas of overlap are decreasing, which may be a good thing for both applications in the long run.

The funniest part of Mr. Turpin's remarks, for me, was where he criticizes Adobe's advertising techniques and then proceeds to say Quark will soon be imitating them. Though it may have nothing to do with the quality of the product, as far as advertising is concerned apparently what they are learning how to do is talk out of both sides of their mouth at the same time. While doing better BS may have a role in marketing a product, I don't see it adding value to the product itself. As others here have observed, most of what Turpin says is no more than wishful thinking. And none of it relates to what Mac users in particular really want from Quark.

Of course, Windows users are inured to a lousy UI so Quark fits right in. On the Mac, though, XPress continues to stand out like a sore thumb. Since Turpin said nothing about an improved user interface for Quark 7, they obviously still don't get it.

In respect to program activation, none of my friends who have upgraded to CS 2 have complained about it. I had my own nightmare experience with XPress 6, so it would seem that Adobe figured out how to protect their product from piracy without making their customers miserable. I won't hold my breath for Quark to do the same.

Don't anthropomorphize computers - They hate that.

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