Creative Suite 3 on the Horizon ('07)

In order to 'sway' designers away from Quark, Adobe is planning on integrating more Photoshop features into its layout application InDesign. There'll be more support for transparency effects and other 'photoshop-like' features.

On the flipside, Quark's beta program has drawn my attention back to this all to familiar program. I grew up on Quark and the program never felt better. The company is finally getting back to what they were good at, a great layout application. Some of the new features in the soon to be released Quark 7 that I like are the tabbed Measurement palette. Tabs above the palette let you change the Measurement palette's view to different editing aspects of a selected item. This eliminates the need to go to the Modify menu for each aspect. For example, I can start with a text box and set up all the font attributes. Move to the Frame tab and then I can give it a frame size, opacity, and style. Go to the paragraph tab to set up drop caps, then on to the drop shadow tab to apply a drop shadow.

The other palettes have been improved and are very similar to the Adobe style found in InDesign and elsewhere. They are much more flexible and can be grouped. Quark 7 will also support Open Type and has improved opacity features. What's really nice is that they are gathering user feedback with their current beta program, which invariably means that they will come up with a good product. Still, the ability to move freely between Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator is amazing. Dragging and dropping between the apps and Bridge facilitates workflow and just makes life easy. If Quark can allow itself to integrate with other Adobe products, then I think they have a great chance to move forward with their product and become a contender for the layout program of choice.