WARNING: thar be jargon ahead, matey!
Quark XPress sucks.
Actually, it doesn't just suck, it invents new ways to suck. It's actually so good at doing so that you kind of have to admire the dumbass engineers at Quark for being able to delve to new realms of suckage. It's quite spectacular.
Quark XPress is, unfortunately, the current standard for desktop publishing (DTP) page layout programs. Back in the day, when we could only work in square interfaces and RAM still cost upwards of $20 per megabtye, it was the bomb, yo. It was mean, lean and let you put whole categories of businesses out of work with a single click (typesetters, etc.). But then they started upgrading, casually ignoring advances in the system software it was running on for years at a time.
And then there's the bugs.
Bugs so bad that some major releases (*cough* 4.0 *cough*) got categorically ignored until the next point release (x.1, x.2, etc.) in which the bugs were squashed to the point of the program being somewhat useable again. I'm sure that Microsoft took it as a personal attack that a company could release a product buggier than Word or Windows. Either that or they were extremely impressed.
The current release is awful. The only thing good about it is that it runs in OS X instead of having to run in classic mode, which creates problems that aren't totally its fault. I was in a "get to know XPress"-type meeting with a rep from Quark, and everytime he mentioned a "feature" that the next version would have I had to think to myself "InDesign [Adobe's competitor to XPress] already does that." "That too." "Wow. Adobe thought of that 4 years ago."
Maybe suck isn't a strong enough word.
Quark XPress sucks.
Actually, it doesn't just suck, it invents new ways to suck. It's actually so good at doing so that you kind of have to admire the dumbass engineers at Quark for being able to delve to new realms of suckage. It's quite spectacular.
Quark XPress is, unfortunately, the current standard for desktop publishing (DTP) page layout programs. Back in the day, when we could only work in square interfaces and RAM still cost upwards of $20 per megabtye, it was the bomb, yo. It was mean, lean and let you put whole categories of businesses out of work with a single click (typesetters, etc.). But then they started upgrading, casually ignoring advances in the system software it was running on for years at a time.
And then there's the bugs.
Bugs so bad that some major releases (*cough* 4.0 *cough*) got categorically ignored until the next point release (x.1, x.2, etc.) in which the bugs were squashed to the point of the program being somewhat useable again. I'm sure that Microsoft took it as a personal attack that a company could release a product buggier than Word or Windows. Either that or they were extremely impressed.
The current release is awful. The only thing good about it is that it runs in OS X instead of having to run in classic mode, which creates problems that aren't totally its fault. I was in a "get to know XPress"-type meeting with a rep from Quark, and everytime he mentioned a "feature" that the next version would have I had to think to myself "InDesign [Adobe's competitor to XPress] already does that." "That too." "Wow. Adobe thought of that 4 years ago."
Maybe suck isn't a strong enough word.
Comments
(Example of its use in a future conversation.) "Dude I can't believe she let you quark her."
"Well yeah dude, hell everyone knows she'll do anything - she was up for being quarked twice, and then she called in her hot roommate and the three of us somehow managed to pull off a simultaneous quark."
"No way, a three-way quark?! How?!"
"Well obviously half the time I had to hold my breath, and thank goodness the roommate had great reflexes."
"Sweet!"