[design] QuarkXPress 7 Public Beta Program is Ending

As announced by Quark in email to its many public beta program participants, the public beta program is coming to a close. The XPress 7 Public Beta 2 is set to time-bomb on 2 May, which means sometime in the next 24 hours, your copy of it will refuse to run.

If you're one of those of who have the taste and discernment to run Mac OS X you do have some more time to play, though. Also in its email, Quark says they will be mounting a Universal Binary Public Beta 1, but not when: it's not up on the beta test program page just yet.

But I will post an announcment at QuarkVsInDesign.com when it does happen.

In all, Quark has improved its flagship high-end page layout and design program quite a bit. InDesign challenged them to bring it and they did. However, I remain unconvinced that this will position Quark ahead of InDesign in terms of power and capabilities. It may be seen as an evening up; it has better PDF, more image manipulation, an improved interface (I'm very impressed with the new palettes), and more ways to do what you want to do (you can do just about everything with a floating palette now...it's almost InDesign like).

This won't woo refugee InDesignistas back; it might, however, stanch the flow of Quark users leaving XPress for InDesign. But then, maybe not; the Adobe Creative Suite offers integration with Illustrator and Photoshop that Quark could, by its very nature, never provide.

But then, PDF Import and QuarkVista provide image geeking that your Quarkster who doesn't Photoshop much will love.

What can I say? Well, what I usually do...for those who like this sort of thing, this will be just the sort of thing they'll like.

Quark Inc: http://www.quark.com
XPress public beta program: http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/seven/beta.html