MacDailyNews - Where Mac news comes first

Nov 21, 07 - 04:33 pm Comment from: informed

OK. I like Macs.

But isn't this waxing poetic a tad extreme?

No Vista and Leopard don't compare directly. But there are still some really crappy Mac apps. InDesign, anyone?

The OS doesn't magically make 3rd party software into gems.

Nov 21, 07 - 04:35 pm Comment from: ron

Old news, but good.

Nov 21, 07 - 04:55 pm Comment from: scoodog

Ridiculous. Leopard is NOT that good. Maybe it will be at 10.5.4 or 10.5.5, but not yet. Too much doesn't work as expected, and overall system sluggishness is suspect.

InDesign a crappy Mac program? I'm a prepress person. I use it everyday. It's not crappy at all. Try QuarkXPress if you want crappy. And it's crappy on Windows and Mac.

Re: scoodog;

I think Leopard is the best OS that Apple has ever produced! Yeah it's got bugs and a few stupid visual ideas (stacks for one) but it rocks. And it's way faster than 10.4.10 was (at least on my MBP).

This is an overstatement. Yes, Apple provides a great suite of apps surrounding the core system, especially iLife and, now, also iWork. But Leopard is still fundamentally an operating system plus some great extras.

Nov 21, 07 - 05:19 pm Comment from: LorD1776

The Munchkins got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They musta registered.

Nov 21, 07 - 05:44 pm Comment from: informed

@ Don:

If you consider InDesign (aka PageMaker 2000) superior to Quark, you are NOT a prepress person. Nice try.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

@ Informed

If you consider Quark superior to InDesign, then you do nothing but output files and no design work. PageMaker 2000, pffft, please. Get a clue!

Nov 21, 07 - 06:05 pm Comment from: El Guapo

Being a Mac user has messed up my life. Now, whenever I'm shopping for something, I'm no longer satisfied with something that is "good enough".

I can't buy mediocre anymore! Is this grounds for a class action lawsuit?

Nov 21, 07 - 06:09 pm Comment from: Spark

1. InDesign is better than Quark.
2. The author the article went a bit overboard in his praise. I think he's in love.

The benefit of Leopard for 3rd party apps won't be felt for many months until Leopard developed versions are developed. Most of Leopards improvements are under the hood and will take time to shine. By that time, Apple will have hopefully fixed some of their Leopard miscues, such as the transparent menu bar. Quibbles with that and the dock changes aside, there is MUCH to like even with this v1 release!

i agree - hate indesign - starting to hate adobe same as i do ms

photoshop and illustrator are good apps i work all day in them but ADOBE does not do as Apple says...

Adobe likes to manipulate some of the dialogue and menus to their whim... so right... osx is not magically made more complete once illustrator is installed.

Oh and I HATE Adobe Bridge and all the other freakin crap Abobe is adding to the SUITE... we never use them at the office.

One day I removed them... bad move... suite didn't work.

Ahhhhhhhh

Stephen Jerkins

Indesign is EXTREMELY sluggish to Quark.
Bloated ware that does not even follow the suite in mind set.

The ONLY reason Indesign is being used is economics.

Adobe put the right price point and bundled the 3 apps at the cost where buying Quark made NO sense.

Quark has been buggy... it was Intel ready first.

I do not use Quark all that much any more... but I do not use Indesign at ALL after installing it.

Perhaps I should learn it better... but nonetheless it is a JUNKY application with upgrades that come once a year as NEW bundles - welcome in the new year with CS4.

AND you will see... ADOBE never fixed any of the issues it had in last years suite.

VERY very DISSAPPOINTED in Adobe.

To similar to MS.

thx

Nov 21, 07 - 06:50 pm Comment from: effwerd

Developers can't help it; merely using the Mac frameworks creates a Mac app, which is distinguished by its integration with and extension of the Mac as a whole.

Tell that to Adobe.

Nov 21, 07 - 06:54 pm Comment from: effwerd

If you consider InDesign (aka PageMaker 2000) superior to Quark, you are NOT a prepress person.

Heh. Nice try right back at ya. Now, I admit, I hate Adobe, but at least they get automation right. Does QXP7 fix the temp path to open file problem yet? I abandoned Quark in my workflow four years ago and things have run smoothly all the way up until CS3 which is slow and buggy as shit. And now that Carbon is a dead end, I imagine CS4 is about six years away. So I might reconsider Quark, but it will take a while.

What I hate about Creative Suite is it's like using three apps from three totally different developers. There's no consistency in the interface. With CS4, Adobe must bite the bullet and introduce some consistency between the three apps.

I only started using CS at the start of the year and use all three daily and equally, but nothing slows me down more than having to stop and think about key combinations and the app I'm in (eg I should be able to deselect in any of the apps without having to stop and think which app I'm in). I still don't trust myself to remember them, so often use the menus.

And that's just the start.

Nov 21, 07 - 07:43 pm Comment from: bond co. stooge

Si, El Guapo, a plethora of lawsuits!

Nov 21, 07 - 08:19 pm Comment from: onionhead

I always felt Quark was the most unintuitive, frustrating and un-maclike program available. I'm still getting the hang of InDesign but so far I don't mind it. I do agree that there is too much inconsistency between Ill, PS and Indesign. The 3 programs overlap too much in what they try to do. I've often thought that all 3 should converge into just one app but I'm sure that wouldn't make sense to Adobe in a purely financial sense.

Nov 21, 07 - 08:35 pm Comment from: Jamie

I use InDesign every day and love it.

Quark, on the other hand, is a piece of garbage, no progression in what it does, ever. I started my career using Quark 3, and I have Quark 7 now and it still looks and performs the same as it did back in the early 90s on a G3 - it sucks.

Most of the comments from people who 'hate' InDesign also say somewhere in there 'I haven't used it enough' or words to that effect. Like I said above, I use InDesign every single day and if you KNOW how to use it, you can achieve so much more than you ever could with Quark.

Considering my company produce upwards of 2000 A3 pages of manuals every week for the likes of Hitachi, BP, Maersk etc. using InDesign you can take my word that InDesign does NOT suck.

Mr Informed up above...
FYI 'Adobe' makes InDesign. And how do you know it's crappy? Not the sort of thing you just nip out and buy on a whim. And for price and support compared to alternative similar desktop publishing tools it's hard to beat Adobe. oh and those crappy apps can simply be trashed.

ah huh. One rung above? Did someone lower the bar?

I like the reviewer's comment that, "There is no Usenet news reader in Leopard." He should have pointed out that Leopard doesn't come with Prodigy installed either.

scoodog: If your system is sluggish, you should have done a clean install of Leopard. Upgrade installs are always buggy and slow. The clean install of Leopard on my 12" powerbook g4 flies compared to Tiger...on my intel mac mini, Leopard is ridiculously fast. And I don't even have the new 64-bit mac mini.

Nov 21, 07 - 09:13 pm Comment from: Mr Hinky Dink

Here here Joop, and what happened to the Atari emulator?

I use Adobe CS1 with no probs. Newsflash, you don't need to upgrade every single time there is an update/upgrade. That just ends up costing you a couple of grand a year and for what? A couple of new paint brush filters, oh and having to learn thr interface all over again. And I agree there are a few apps that are useless to me, but hey we all work in different ways.
My arsenal consists of... Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. That's it. No worries. and if you want to be technical they do own all the old Macromedia stuff so I guess so you can throw Flash and Dreamweaver into the mix. But essentialy they are the only 5 Adobe product I use (and acrobat reader/swf player of course).
So running modern new gear (duo MBP) with software a couple of years old. Everythings working fine since i downgraded to Tiger. Leopard ain't perfect not by a long shot. But Lion or whatever next year will be huge.

Nov 21, 07 - 09:18 pm Comment from: NeonRed

The app development ripple effect of Leopard is on the order of the iPhone. The under-the-hood parts are game changing —to use that hackneyed phrase. Software houses (cough--Adobe) that are too big and bloated to change course will have to paddle like heck to not be passed by fleetier boats. CS3 is like one of those Roman triremes with the three rows of oars all akimbo moving asynchronistically in the ocean. Leopard profoundly levels the field of app development.
Some coders recognize this and decline to squeal it to the bloat houses, but the realization will come to all nonetheless—in time.
One has to look no further than the new crop of photoshop wannbes; if a new app is 10.5 only one can surmise the developer probably gets it. It's going to be fun the next few years. Being one who uses CSX all day. i sincerely hope Adobe gets their sh*t together soon— still fun, but that blonde over there is sure looking better and better, and when she turns 18…

These people should be fired and all MS ad sponsorship pulled!


http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Nov 21, 07 - 11:04 pm Comment from: silverhawk

I miss Pagemaker 4 and 4.5. Once it hit v5 Pagemaker and Adobe went down hill quickly.

perfection?

10.5, for me, has been nothing short of hell. I have had to rebuild my system from the ground up after weeks of dealing with this bloatware. Yes, it's bloatware, you can't deny it. there's so much crap in this OS that it's bewildering to actually try to install a fresh system and re-integrate your old prefs and such, ala Classic Mac OS. I know, all the flame throwers are being warmed up, but that's my experience on a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. I get lots of:

- Safari hanging during loading web pages
- pinwheels galore when plugging in my iphone
- intense slow downs and often backup failures when dealing with Time Machine
- annoyances with the new stacks in the docks. I don't like it, I want it turned off...but how do you do it? How???
- the reflective dock is annoying. the way permissions are handled is lame.


the only good thing is Quicklook, I think. that's pretty much it. And I know, oh, if I have slowdowns I am supposed to do a clean install, which I had to resort to, but most people are going to upgrade from 10.4.x to 10.5--why must it bog my system down so badly? surely Apple tested this...or did they?



My 10.4 to 10.5 upgrade was a disaster and I think, personally that 10.5 was released to early. A rung above perfection? gimme a break. It's as if the article was tailor made to be on this website.

and before you rant, chances are I have been using the Mac longer than you (22 years), so eat it.

must suck to be you

Nov 22, 07 - 12:35 am Comment from: Mr Hinky Dink

Gamble,
It's horrible I know but a fresh clean install is the best way to go. Sure you can backup your contacts/bookmarks/prefs whatever but it's too much hassel trying to feed that info back in. Better just start from scratch. Better spend a week doing that than 2 or 3 weeks wrestling with it.
I do agree with some of your points though some are just cosmetic...
Stacks - didn't like how it behaved
Adding Ports - Couldn't for the life of me find where in system prefs the option was.
Quicktime - Those little picture icons (i'm sure could be turned off somewhere, didn't like)
I played with Leo for a few weeks before deciding it didn't realy offer me anything new i was going to use.
Time machine - I've had it for years. I just drag whatever I want to backup to an external drive or burn off a DVD.
Spaces - Yeah I get it but meehh can cope without.

Oh and Quicklook - Theres a freeware thing out there called Milky Way. You simply click a file and an image pops up. I don't think it works across the whole gamit of file formats but for general jpg bmp type viewing it's great. I had Tiger tamed nicely and that's what I'm sticking too at the moment.

Nov 22, 07 - 01:16 am Comment from: MizuInOz

<rant>

10.5 has been a dream for me on my 17" Macbook Pro but a true PIA (pain in the ass - for those of you who don't know) on my MacPro (Dual 3 Ghz Quads - 16 Gb of RAM - 3 Tb internal HDD and 4 Tb external HDD in a Drobo sys - Dual 30' Appl Monitors) - I have to reboot EVERY time I accidentally let the system go to sleep, it wil not recognise my Drobo - so Time Machine is DITW (dead in the water) for me - and it is one of the things I really wanted and needed. I did a clean install. Took a week as mentioned previously. Hmph, did an archive and install on the McBook Pro. I have zero problems.

i do miss one little item - I know this will be strange to everyone but Crissy (Hey!) but I can no longer right click-command and download FLV files from YouTube to any source. I liked that. Appears broken in Leopard. Reinstalled the newest virgin of Stand, too.

</rant>

Oh and I've been using Apple products since before the Mac and have used Macs since the first iteration, so I am a bit familiar with the technology. IMHO - InDesign outclasses QuarkXpress. period. Never has been intuitive or truly Mac Friendly. And I have used both products way too long. I want to go sit on a beach and just unlax.

Cheers and Happy Turkey Day to all of you Yanks!

Nov 22, 07 - 01:24 am Comment from: TowerTone

"Leopard is a rung above perfection"

So when 'Perfection' looks up the ladder, he sees some wild pu$$y?

Drove 95 Miles last night through a snowstorm to pick up mini-dvi to dvi adapter that both Apple stores in my town were out of. I have been out of circulation since mid-October in various phases of post-production and hence not made it into an apple store since Leopard's release. I had seen nothing but screen shots and had been not at all thrilled with the look of it. I wasn't planning on upgrading anytime soon as ProTools LE supposedly will not run under it and I have heard/read a few stories about After Effects CS3 also (two applications that I and my shop cannot live without). Only a fool would upgrade to an untested product during real work anyway but that is another story.

Now that I have seen it live and in person and played around with it I am fairly impressed. The screen shots do not do it justice and hope for a speedy series of upgrades to pro level apps all around.

As for InDesign, et al... well the interface inconsistencies are mind boggling for a suite of apps that are so mature and dominant. But Quark Distress is not an option for page layout in my shop anymore. Quark (the company) is useless at best and belligerent at worst. And it does not compare favorably feature for feature, interface or usability in my eyes. I no longer do publishing on daily basis (it used to be my business) and therefore do not consider myself to be even close to an expert. I haven't touched Quark Since InDesign 2 came out. But as far as work flow, scripting etc. I am in total agreement with Don. As bad as Adobe may be you would think that Quark, having become the underdog in a sense would have cleaned up its' act. Not from what I have heard.

But as far as content creation and manipulation goes there really are no competitors to Adobe's CS3 suite for what it does in its' price range. And lest anyone think that either Adobe or Quark are the worst... has anyone tried to use Avid? What an antiquated piece of crap. ProTools is great (same ownership as Avid). But I cringe every time a client wants their project edited in Avid. What a colossal waste of time compared to FCP. And I/we do use the bridge. For metadata and whatnot you can't beat the price. As you (at least the pros on this board) can probably tell mine is a relatively new shop and therefore not leashed to legacy work flows and apps.

I am kind of salivating at the possibilities for Leopard. Can't wait to see apps in about a year or two when developers really get going on it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

@El Guapo

I agree. No "good enough" product seems good anymore, only best products are good, and only revolutionary products make me excited.

Nov 22, 07 - 04:34 pm Comment from: Crabapple

Someone may have mentioned this before, but I will repeat it anyway.

Indesign is an app that runs on both Macs & PC's, it was the precursor to CS1, CS2 & now CS3 which includes Flash if you buy the professional version.

Flash is not supported on the iphone because it is not secure.

Adobe makes software for both the PC & Mac just as Quark does, this does not make what they produce Mac-centric and therefor bad Mac software as implied by informed et al.

Mac Apps. include itunes, Quicktime, iwork, iwork family pack, ilife, ilife family pack, Final cut express, Final cut studio 2, Final cut Pro, Logic studio, Logic studio express, Logic studio Pro, Garage band, Shake, Xsan, Apeture, .Mac, .Mac family pack.

Conclusion:- Mac Apps are Horrendously superior to their counterparts that they very rarely will you see articles comparing them as on a one to one.

informed may have been the first to send a post but whoever they are, they are certainly not as informed as they would like to imply nor should the rest of you be spending energy extending the mis-information!!!

I HAVE SPOKEN

Nov 22, 07 - 06:16 pm Comment from: MacRaven

We deal with about 20 printers. Don't know of ANY that prefer Quark in pre-press. And I don't even know any design friends using Quark anymore.

Only one I know using Quark is our two cent home town newspaper that's too scared to switch.

Nov 23, 07 - 12:55 am Comment from: Rip Ragged

Overboard? Maybe. There is no such thing as perfect. Relatively speaking, though, there isn't anything else out there to match Leopard on the points the article mentions.

Here, try this. Roll your pointer over the mini-player for iTunes. Now move your scroll wheel. The volume will go up and down. You don't have to push a button or anything. That is the kind of meaningless, trivial detail (and there are tons of them) that makes Apple OSes blow Windows into the weeds.

Nov 23, 07 - 10:42 am Comment from: G3 Creative Scotland

Let the battle commence.

Is Quark Xpress better than InDesign - NO

Is InDesign better than Quark Xpress - NO

Sounds like the same argument we use to have at G3 Creative
6 years ago in regards to Freehand and Illustrator or is Mac better than PC (Okay your right on the Mac PC question).

I personally loved Freehand but others in the company would disagree and used Adobe Illustrator.

Both Quark and InDesign applications are fabulous and we use them both
in a daily basis as one may be better at the other in certain aspects.

Quark lost a lot of design business to Adobe InDesign because it's pricing policy got out of hand but with the new policy of upgrade costs being good, this has changed.

Some repro houses prefer InDesign while others prefer Quark.

Nov 27, 07 - 01:31 pm Comment from: informed

InDesign looks like Illustrator but behaves nothing like it. TOTAL SUCK.

Consider the time and effort it takes to replace an FPO image in InDesign - verses the time for the same common chore in QuarkXpress. TOTAL SUCK.

If you resize a page in InDesign (very common task), everything things centers. WTF!!!!! TOTAL SUCK.

If you resize a text or graphic box, depending on the F'n tool, it will stretch or reflow the box contents, ala PageMaker. In twenty I have never encountered a situation where that is desirable. WTF!!!! TOTAL SUCK.

The list goes on. InDesign is for hacks. Designed by hacks. Sold to cheapskate hacks.

Nov 27, 07 - 01:37 pm Comment from: G3 Creative Scotland

mmm - a wee bit extreme and sorry we don't really agree.