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Two, five, 10: The beta for Quark XPress 5.0, lower left, affords users the opportunity to build web pages with the same tools used for traditional print layout. Adobe InDesign 2.0, upper left, now comes with a table function (and is here running under Mac OS X). Mac OS X 10.1, right, provides a variety of new user interface features, including the ability to move the Dock to the right or left, the transparency of menus and the reorganization of the system preferences palette. |
Adobe, Apple, Quark surprise
with new versions of key apps
SAN FRANCISCO -- Rarely do suppliers even appear to coordinate announcements about new products. Usually, the word trickles out at various venues across a variety of industries.
But this year at Seybold San Francisco, held here Sept. 24-28, three major publishing products suppliers -- Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., and Quark Inc. of Denver -- all made announcements about the latest versions of applications.
Adobe and Quark had been mumbling about the potential announcements of the latest versions of their page layout applications -- InDesign and XPress, respectively -- for months, so the fact that they did so at Seybold wasn't startling. But while the industry understood that a new version of Apple's operating system, OS X, was in the wings, nobody seemed to realize that it would be not only announced at Seybold, but released there as well.
The new versions of these products, which are the cornerstones of more than a couple of publishing systems, are important on a variety of levels, not the least of which is that they all came out within 48 hours of one another.
Ten-point-one
While the Adobe and Quark announcements were expected, the release of the first major revision of Apple's new operating system came as a surprise.
Scheduled to be in Paris for a conference, Steve Jobs, Apple's founder and chief executive, was supposed to make the announcement via a videoconference. The Paris meeting was canceled because of the events of Sept. 11, so Jobs made the OS X 10.1 announcement in person. (Because of the plan to do it via TV, this was not one of Jobs' more memorable performances.)
The company offered upgrades to Seybold attendees as they left the keynote address, and upgrades were available in its trade show booth.
Though Apple didn't make any specific mention of it, OS X 10.1 is supposed to provide better stability than its predecessor. While the operating system rarely crashed, OS X did seem to have some problems with native applications, causing them to crash.
Apple did trumpet performance boosts in virtually every aspect of the OS. Applications, the company says, launch two to three times faster; in the Seybold keynote demo, a couple of programs didn't even cause the application's icon in the Dock to bounce, an indication of lots of speed.
Menus pull down with almost no hesitation. In the demo, the mouse was moved over menus and they just appeared; the company says the response time is five times faster than before.
The resizing of windows also is done as much as five times faster, and file copying is twice as fast. Apple says performance has been boosted in other areas as well, including start-up, log-in, Java interpretation, the launching of the Classic environment and OpenGL (screen imaging is now 20 percent faster).
One of the most glaring omissions from the first release of OS X was the ability to play DVD movies or burn CDs. OS X 10.1 not only takes care of those two problems, it goes one better: It provides a relatively simple interface for burning DVDs (assuming you have a machine with the SuperDrive).
A DVD will hold more than 4 gigabytes of data, which is about seven times as much as a CD. The DVD controller has been redesigned from its System 9 cousin and seems easier to use as well, and the audio environment is "the most advanced," with "high-resolution 32-bit/96-kilohertz."
A major new feature for the operating system is enhanced AppleScript support. This is best illustrated in the toolbar scripts concept, which allows AppleScripts -- small, easy-to-write productivity enhancement applications -- to be placed into the Dock for quick launching.
The new operating system also sports a simplified user interface for its ColorSync 4.0 color management tool. Further, 10.1 supports more digital cameras automatically, including those from Canon, Kodak and Nikon.
The company has also included more print drivers, which allow for automatic setup for most popular inkjet printers, and support for professional-grade PostScript printers, including configuration files for more than 200 devices from Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox.
Apple touted the fact that more than 1400 native applications have been released for OS X, including Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 and Macromedia Freehand 10. In addition, Apple announced that a time-limited beta version of Microsoft Word for OS X was now available on the web sites of both Apple and Microsoft. Apple executives at the Seybold session demonstrated Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word applications designed specifically for OS X.
More reaching out to Microsoft was illustrated in the operating system's ability to support SMB/Cifs, the Windows file-sharing standard. Other networking standards that are supported include Apple Filesharing Protocol (AFP) over TCP/IP, AFP over AppleTalk, Network File System (NFS) and the WebDAV protocol.
Mac OS X 10.1 is available as a free upgrade to users of the initial release of OS X; all they need to do is to visit an Apple retailer to pick up the upgrade package (as the saying goes, "while supplies last"). A mail-out upgrade is available for $19.95.
InDesign, take two
Adobe used its time at Seybold San Francisco to talk about a variety of products and technologies, but certainly the centerpoint of its announcements was the 2.0 release of its InDesign page layout application.
New features for the product include eXtensible Markup Language (XML) support, table creation, transparency, long document support, a new printing interface, native Mac OS X support and tighter integration with other Adobe products.
Oh, and it, too, is faster than its predecessor.
While the company announced the new version in late September, it said the application wouldn't be available until sometime in early 2002. Upgrades for the first 90 days following release will be $99, and $149 thereafter; purchases of the 1.0 version made between now and when the 2.0 version is released will be upgraded free.
The application's new table-creation tools support the importing of data from Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel as well as handling table-creation from scratch. The InDesign table features are strikingly familiar to anyone who has built tables in Word or Excel.
Transparency has heretofore been the province of graphics applications, not page layout programs. But demonstrations of InDesign 2.0 show that the feature can be easily applied in many ways, which include feathering elements, creating type drop shadows that remain editable and setting the opacity of objects. Transparent Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Acrobat files can be placed into an InDesign 2.0 document and will retain their transparencies.
Long document support probably wasn't high on the request list supplied by newspaper customers, but the new features will quiet a segment of Adobe PageMaker users who have refused to move to InDesign because of the lack of support for these features. (Their adoption would increase the InDesign user base, making Adobe more likely to keep up development and enhancements). This support includes the ability to group related documents into lists used to generate page numbers, tables of contents and indexes.
The new InDesign no longer requires the Adobe printer driver and will now support "a wide variety of professional print workflows."
Adobe made two other announcements of interest at Seybold:
Adobe Illustrator 10 will be available before the end of the year. The new version of the venerable vector graphics application will support data-driven graphics, which are supposed to automate the preparation of repetitive artwork.
In addition, the application has been pointed more toward the Web, with the ability to create scalable vector graphics (SVG) and support for HTML tables with cascading style sheet layers and Macromedia Flash format export. Upgrades will be $149, while the street price is expected to be $400.
Not a product but significant nonetheless, Adobe announced a new format for handling document metadata, eXtensible Metadata Protocol (XMP). Metadata is the information about a document -- who created it, when and where it was created, what rights are available for its use, where it's been used -- and up until now, metadata handling has been free-form.
Adobe's new format -- which relies upon standards of the World-Wide Web including XML and Resource Description Format (RDF) -- will be incorporated into all Adobe products. The company has released a software development kit to allow third parties to write XMP data to their applications as well; the company is also publishing the format.
Think of XMP as something like the header information that is available in an editorial or advertising front-end. Then if you realize that similar information will soon be available without having a front-end system, you begin to get a glimmer of the potential for XMP.
Take five
Though no specific release date has been given to Quark XPress 5.0, the company is running a massive public beta program and was distributing CD-ROMs with the application at Seybold San Francisco (the beta is also available for download on the Quark web site at http://www.quark.com/).
The most important aspect of the latest version of the world's most popular page layout application is that it now supports a WYSIWYG (or, more accurately, What You See Is Almost What You Get) web page development environment in addition to the traditional print page development environment.
Though the two types of pages are different, the traditional XPress tools work in both.
The new web page documents have a "web tools" palette that handles form control and image mapping. Forms, which can contain text fields, check boxes, radio buttons and pop-up menus, are built using tools that are similar to other XPress tools. Image maps allow designers to attach web links to specific areas within web graphics; a variation on image mapping is the "rollover," which swaps out pictures when the user's cursor moves over the picture (think of those buttons on web pages that change color or contrast when you mouse over them).
Whether you are targeting your document for HTML or PDF, the new version of XPress now allows for the embedding of hyperlinks for navigation, either within the document or elsewhere on the Web.
Also new in XPress 5.0 is table support; since newspaper users have been complaining about XPress' inability to handle tabular data for almost 15 years, this feature has arrived none too soon. Much like its competitor Adobe, the engineers at Quark have also seen how tables are handled in Microsoft applications, and those familiar with Word or Excel will feel right at home in the XPress table functions.
XPress will now support the concept of layers, a feature commonly found in Adobe products -- grouping page elements in separate overlays. For example, frequently it is necessary to have elements on a page that shouldn't print. If all these elements are grouped onto a layer that is hidden at output, then they won't print.
Layers allow publishers to create different versions of the same page or element; think of zoned newspaper pages, or one ad that has different addresses for geographically dispersed stores. Without layers, separate documents would have to be created for each output.
Quark also has enhanced the "collect for output" function -- it now will copy fonts and color profiles when it collects and copies graphics files into a folder to be sent to an outside imaging service.
Color management features have been enhanced to include allowing the operator the choice of properties to be preserved when the application performs color translation for RGB, Cmyk and Hexachrome colors.
Also new on the XPress 5.0 plate:
Contextual menus: Depending upon where you are in the application or on the page, additional features are available by holding down the Macintosh control key while clicking.
Visual indicators: Little graphical clues lie within the application to help designate layers, such as when a web document's text box will be rendered as HTML or as a graphic.
Printing: The print preview dialog has been improved. There is now an option to print blank plates, and non-PostScript printing has been enhanced.
Indexes: A variety of changes have been made here, including the ability to add all words into the index and an "add reversed" button, which takes a proper name and adds it to the index by last name, then first name.
Books: Improvements have been made in chapters and page numbering, and in smoothing the ability to build books across a network.
Other added features include specifying a character style sheet when defining a list, and a command to fit a box to the picture inside it, as well as a command to fit a box to its picture proportionally. Also, text boxes now can contain multiple values for insetting text.
-- dmc
"[Adobe InDesign 2.0's] superior design tools, great integration with Adobe products, and enhanced tools for developers give InDesign a clear edge for our designers and our publishing clients."
-- Roger Black, Chairman, DaniloBlack Inc., New York City
Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-6000,
e-mail: info@adobe.com;
Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 996-1010;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888,
e-mail: quarkxpress@quark.com.
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