Briefly: Quark 7 on May 23; exec options; more
While Quark is gathering the European press for a QuarkXPress 7 launch event at the Congress Centre in London on June 2, it actually plans to first debut the major desktop publishing software upgrade in the United States this month.
The Denver, Colorado company will host an invitation-only special event at The Puck Building in New York City on May 23 to formally unveil QuarkXPress 7, which has been in public beta for several months.
Quark promises the event to include "special sessions, special speakers, and special surprises." It will kick-off with a keynote by Jürgen Kurz, the company's senior vice president of product management.
QuarkXPress 7 will be a Universal Binary application capable of running natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. It will include a slew of new features such as new transparency tools, picture effects enhancements, SD import enhancements, composite zones and content sharing tools.
Fadell, Johnson exercise options
Members of Apple's executive team continued this month to cash in on the company's success.
Between May 1st and May 3rd, newly appointed iPod chief Tony Fadell exercised 45,437 stock options — including 3500 owned by his wife — to cash in on a cool $3.2M.
According to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fadell paid between $10.19 and $10.89 for the options, which he sold at market values between $71.11 and $71.38.
A day later, Apple's retail boss Ron Johnson exercised a total of 150,000 company stock options, reaping over $10.7M. Johnson paid $23.78 for the options, which he disposed of at market values between $72.00 and $72.28.
Following the sales, Fadell and Johnson retained 577 and 149,890 shares of Apple common stock, respectively.
Apple closes down OS X for Intel
In fear of software pirates, Apple has closed down the Intel version of Mac OS X, according to a report.
"Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code," Tom Yager wrote for InfoWorld. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."
While Yager notes that Apple has only shipped client systems where users care little about openness, he notes the company soon "will break out Intel variants of the kinds of machines [...] namely, servers and workstations."
8 Comments
Friggin'A. One more version of Quark docs that won't open and InDesign and a huge whopping excuse to stay on Quark for all those archaic printers.
I mean yay for competition and all, but these locked formats have to go.
well, quark did see an opportunity to beat adobe to an intel-ready version, BUT if it can't open current indesign files, it won't bring anybody BACK to their side.
i just hope, for anyone still using quark, that they didn't rush it to market because of the intel thing. otherwise, it might be a beta-mess.
Rok, I'm more concerned with folks that are using InDesign; considering Quark has essentially shut InDesign out of Quark formats newer than 5; if that continues we could run into a situation where there are a lot more files floating around out there that InDesign can't open.
I can justify the cost of InDesign, and if this version of Quark is exceptional, I might justify the cost of Quark, but I can't justify both just to be able to open files of the other.
Quark should worry about getting their software to work properly first before rushing to try and beat InDesign to the gate.
Anyone who has encountered an "end of file" error knows what I mean.
I'm with Chevalier. Everyone needs Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acorbat, and when you buy the CS they "throw in" InDesign. That's a compelling reason to use InDesign for small companies.
If all software were free, though, I'd use Quark in a second. It's not a matter of "archaic" printers sticking to Quark, it's simply that it's a better tool for getting the job done well. To make one example, InDesign is absolutely worthless for doing any sort of alpha layering -- it's so bad, that the feature may as well not even be there. Despite its quirks, Quark does a good job at everything it allows you to do, and does so on a tight, fast-running code-base. InDesign is a bloated nightmare.