Quark Interactive Designer Announced
Things just got very interesting in the world of page layout.
Quark Inc. today announced Quark Interactive Designer. From the press release.
Quark Interactive Designer is an optional module for QuarkXPress 7 that extends the capabilities of QuarkXPress to allow designers to include motion, sound, and interactivity in their designs and to output SWF (Flash®) files. This software combines the precision of the QuarkXPress 7 design tools with the power and flexibility of the SWF (Flash) format for the creation of projects with rich design and robust interactivity.
I’m going to be reviewing the product for CreativePro.com, but on first glance, this is a very good move on the part of Quark Inc. Given the modest photo-editing capabilities, html layout options, PDF output, and now SWF (Flash) output for interactive pages with sound and multimedia content, it looks like QuarkXPress has just gotten itself a little “suite-er.”
Our colleague Pariah has posted more about Quark Interactive Designer on his other website, Quarkvs.InDesign:
http://quarkvsindesign.com/articles/a1/features/2006/quark-does-flash/
Well, there’s no doubt it’s interesting, though of course Quark has gone down this road before (with their almost total disaster of QuarkImmedia). I personally would love to be able to export SWF from InDesign.
Yawn.
Didn’t the get the message the first time they tried to integrate web functionality with Quark?
Maybe it’s just me – but I don’t use Dreamweaver to make layouts – and I don’t use Indesign for web layouts (just comps).
I do, however, use InDesign to layout banner ads and other static Web images. The tool is wonderful for that. I can then export directly to JPG or export as PDF and then open that in Photoshop for further tweaking.
If I could use the interactive features already in ID (hyperlinks, movies, sound, buttons, and so on) plus add some Flash animation to those files from within InDesign and export as SWF… well, that would be quite wonderful and useful.
David , didn’t you write a book on Immedia?
Why are the dates of these previous posts dated 2006? Or is that what Quark is hoping for… things as they were way back then?
A better question would be why are you posting to a two-year old thread?
It is a funny thing, having blog posts that go back to 2006 which sometimes bubble to the top in Related Posts, recent comments, or in searches. Perhaps we should start cutting off comments on some of these old ones that aren’t really relevant anymore. (Certainly, some old posts are just as relevant today as they were back then, but this “news” isn’t…)