Back in July, two representatives from Quark came to the CapMac meeting to demonstrate the new Universal (compatible with PowerPC and Intel-based Macs) version of their product. I remember the last time how QuarkXpress was the biggest holdout on making the transition from Mac OS 9 to X, thus Apple still sold G4 towers that still booted in Mac OS 9 until a Carbonized version of it shipped. Now they’re well ahead of Adobe with a version of QuarkXpress capable of running natively on the Intel-based Macs without having to use the Rosetta piece.
Their demonstration was impressive and it showed how far behind the curve while Adobe’s product (InDesign) remains sluggish and has more in common with its clunkier predecessor PageMaker. I asked them if Quark’s leadership would ever release a stripped down version of QuarkXpress for those who really prefer it over InDesign but don’t need all the features (unless I planned on starting up my own service bureau). Apple did the same tactic with the introduction of Final Cut Express for those who didn’t need everything Final Cut Pro does. The answer was “no” because the powers that be at Quark gave it a few minutes of thought, then decided against it because the product is worth every penny. If I had my own Fortune 5000 company, sure, I could justify shelling out the $750 for one copy. I wasn’t too dejected, they gave everyone at CapMac some awesome swag.
Luck would have it, I scored an education copy for $200! It runs like a champ on my G4 1.25 GHz. I’m a bit rusty yet it converted two old print versions of Picayune I compiled through QuarkXpress 3 over a decade ago. The cliché about relearning a piece of software as if it were riding a bike has been pretty true. Due to my recent bout of illness, I haven’t been able to press on it much more. I will be going through a bunch of other old documents and converting them up to version 7.01 (the current). Then I can “print” out copies of the old documents as PDFs for future use since I doubt I could afford to upgrade this software for another decade, lottery winnings aside. Then I can start up the other projects I wanted to do with QuarkXpress I kept failing to complete due to InDesign’s (versions 1 through CS) constipated nature. This Universal 7.01 is just as smooth and quick as the version 3 I enjoyed using on my LC, 7100, Wave 120 and G3 back in the Nineties.