Update your ancient Quark on the cheap

I'm simply amazed by the overabundance of dissatisfied and pissed off former Quark users. When I posted earlier this morning, I was a little apprehensive about flaming the Application without being in company.

With this amount of bad PR, I would think that a Quark representative would have chimed in here in the forums, to state the companies point of view.

Without a response from Quark, it looks as though our complaints and previous negative issues with support, software stability and overpriced upgrades are justified. hmmm

I remember when it was Quark leapfrogging PageMaker leapfrogging Quark leapfrogging PageMaker, back in the days when it was also MacUser vs. Macworld. Then Quark by 4.1 had become the happy industry standard, the competitor having settled into being PainMaker. Quark's always been there, and imagine if it hadn't--do you think InDesign would exist? And why were ID1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 so sucky? Why does ID take such huge computing resources that the nimble Quark never did just to do the same stuff? And can InDesign yet do colors as easily as Quark? Why the delay on Hexachrome? It just shows how much the Quark engineers, the great part of Quark, had been able to accomplish, way before Adobe. Take away the horrors of the business side, and Quark would have continued to be unsurpassed. True, now four generations into the Adobe Creative Suite, it will take much more than a $299 offer to get most designers that've gone to ID to come back. But that doesn't take away from what Quark, once upon a time, was to almost all of us, annum after annum, issue after issue, late into the nights.

Quark? any version upgrade? sounds like an entree of desperation with extra desperate sauce, rofl.

Who will really go back to using that software/trusting that sh*thole of a company?

All adobe needs to do is trim down the now overly bloated, SLOW, yet still relatively easy to use indesign and i can see quark filing for bankruptcy any day now.

Still using Quark 7.31 but not by choice.

And in the future I will lead the march to abolish the beast.

Oh, don't be wrong for 20 years it survived us mostly well.

A cross-platform upgrade might be more useful here... if you own InDesign, here's a discount for Quark...

I was done with Quark in 1999 when the macs I supported were upgraded to the G4 towers. This was the first time these offices had USB-based Macs, and I had a hell of a time getting Quark installed because it required that damn dongle, and they didn't have a USB version. We had to order converters for every machine.

I left that position a few months later for different reasons, but I'm glad my current employer is all about InDesign.

desperation in the form of too little too late.

The last gasp of a dying (dead?) company.

We moved over to InDesign simply because it took years for Quark to get its act together and release a OS X version of their software.

And yes, I actually learned Graphic Design in college using Quark, but used InDesign at a newspaper and even in the early days on InDesign, there was a night and day difference in usability with Quark being practically unusable it crashed so much even doing basic operations.

Sorry 300 is too much for that piece of crap. They had their chance, they WHERE the industry standard, but just like Avid vs Final Cut Pro, Quark squandered their lead in lack of support to Adobe, and it eroded their base to nothing now.

Perfect example how NOT to run a company.

I've got 2-3 thousand dollars in old Quark software dating back to 3, 4, 5, and 6. And hundreds of hours in "hold" time to India for "permission" to use their software for Version 6. Reinstalling was the only way to resolve the bi-monthly shut down of Quark. Not to mention the rudeness of their "support" team.

This what happens when you don't have competition for a few years, you start treating your loyal customers like thieves. Indesign changed that, in fact Quark made Indesign a better product because of it.

I'm not spending three hundred dollars for Quark when I can put that towards the next CSS upgrade. If they want me back, the next one would have to be free with a written apology, and I 'm still not sure that I'd install it. Four years later and I'm still mad at them.

"... guaranteed to crash the computer at least once an hour,"

Yes, but it does not stop there. For ent/corp licensing customers we have the pleasure of dealing with the lovely "Quark License Administrator" server.

QLA is one of those dripping pieces of code that you just want to see disappear in a hard drive fire and never have to look at it again. It has this lovely habit of randomly deciding to take over the whole computer it is installed on. After months of trying to baby it along, we finally had to bite the bullet and set it up on a machine all by itself. That way it can grab the entire CPU and it hurts nothing but itself.

Competition is great, but Quark is long past its time to go extinct.