MJ's Profile

My first encounter with the ‘MS Office for the rest of your life’ campaign was on Apple.com. The visual does not include the collage slice-of-life pictures you mention though. I think the slogan works, I got it immediately. It’s a very simple and powerfull way of telling people how they should understand the concept of iLife (think news soundbite). The customers ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ questions are the first ones you need to answer with this kind of product. It is also a very smart way of pitting Apple against Microsoft. Who wants te be reminded of his/her cubicle when computing at home/in leisure time?

The release is now official but still you will have to wait a little longer. As seen this past week Quark is quite capable of messing things up beyond even the worst imaginable scenario. As far as I can see they only mentioned the US single language version. No Passport version has been announced. And were it not for OS X nobody would have to buy it because the lack of innovation and the high price. Since version 3 the hermits in Denver have stopped evolution all together. Such a pity. There are many good things in XPress which with some improvement could be great.

Catman, for curiosities sake: how did you ever defend the omission of Caps to lower caps in Quark? The interface wasn?t that good overall though. Think of the lack of scaling possibilities of list view windows (usage, color etc) and the nonstandard size of the scroll bars. And what about having to erase the 6,35 mm (1/2 inch) input that is always in the duplication dialog? Zero would have been more usefull. Forgot you always have to remove the checkboxes for red green and blue (RGB colors in a program that untill recently could not print decently to non-postscript devices) and scroll down when you want separated output? Bad UI-design to me. The only partially good part of the Quark interface is the parameters window. But why can?t I do multiplications the same way I do additions in it? And why will it let me specify non-printing properties for a font? I?ve been looking at a pre-release version of XPress 6 too. It looks like Quark 4 in an OS X interface to me. Almost no changes and certainly no improvements in the interface. Oh well, it?s been this way since version 3 I think, but still its sad to think of soooo many missed chances. Soooo silly not to team up with Adobe on postscript and PDF. BTW has anyone ever seen a decent review/comparo of what XPress delivers in a web publishing environment?

I partly agree/disagree. I think Apple?s switch campaign is first targeting the potential users that were not aware they are in reality Mac folk. Pick the low hanging fruit first. In the mean time Apple is working like mad to complete a very professional computing alternative for more demanding users (servercapabilities, OS connection and security capabilities, speed etc.) including a set of productivity apps. A full force switching campaign at this moment would reveal the missing pieces and thus disqualify Apple and OS X within the IT world for years to come.