About eighteen months ago, someone rang me up from Quark (long before I got involved with them) and asked me what I thought of their App Studio. This goes through to the new features themselves. Even so, the willingness to help, sort out problems, give advice and generally make it fun if quite unparalleled. Obviously this doesn’t always happen, especially not for feature requests, and there are still people who are insisting that the one feature they need has to be the next one implemented.
On occasion I’ve seen bugs reported by users and fixed by Quark’s engineers on the same day. It’s quite unlike any other commercial Facebook group (or forum) I’ve ever been part of. Half the posts are by users, and half the posts are by Quark’s own team, including developers, quality controllers, and the guy in charge of the whole QuarkXPress outfit. I have to say that I never really engaged with Quark as an organisation back in the 2000s when this was supposed to be the case, except occasional contact when I upgraded. (I see from my account that I have been upgrading since 1997.) A year ago, though, I joined Quark’s Facebook group. Maybe you’re saying it needed to be: Quark did have the reputation of being aloof, even arrogant. Quark the company is exceptionally responsive to its users. The Quark interface has always run quicker than InDesign’s, but that’s not what I mean here. The thing is, it isn’t Quark’s new features that take it right past Adobe InDesign. There may also be an HTML5 version coming… If you want to know what they are, you could do worse than buy my book: Desk Top Publishing with QuarkXPress 2016. Heck, if you desperately want to know and can’t afford to buy the book, email me and I’ll let you have a look at the PDF. QuarkXPress 2016 has a lot of other new features. Combine it with Flixels or other looping video stills, and you have something that will bring people back again and again. The point is that print suddenly goes Harry Potter-like those photographs which people wander in and out of. You can put any audio on, but pristine audio recorded in a studio (even a home studio, with proper equipment and sound-damping) will help to perfect it, whereas substandard audio or (worse) a standard audio track that everyone knows will dissolve the magic. Of course, like all things interactive, the magic comes when you develop specific resources that make the most of it. You can turn it into an interactive one in about half an hour. You can turn a relatively simple print publication into a web-app for the iPad, other tablets or smartphones in about six clicks. But the result has always been clunky, sub-standard, not quite right. It’s been tried before, in a number of ways. For the first time, we can create seamless HTML5 apps straight from desktop publishing software. You may have seen my post before about conversion to native objects. It’s been my great privilege to work with the Quark team as one of their testers in the weeks leading up to it.