Quark fans face long wait for next flagship release

Quark has opened up the testing of its QuarkXPress 7 beta software to the general public, offering the download to all interested parties in order to gain comprehensive feedback about its effectiveness in real world settings.

While the lagging release date opens up the prospect of Quark losing further ground to its competitor Adobe, which released its low-price software package Adobe Creative Suite 2 in April last year, Quark insists its scheduled shipping date of later this year will ensure a top-quality product.

Tarra Gukhool, corporate communications at Quark, says everyone at the company is proud to have worked on the latest release of QuarkXPress. As such, quality and testing are emphasised as crucial to the software's release.

“Quark is committed to releasing vigorously tested software to the market,” says Gukhool. “Quark has spent considerable time testing the software through a pre-release program with its customers around the world. We plan on shipping in Q2 of this year, but again, quality is most important to us.”

Gukhool claims the extensive testing period will help ensure the software is of an optimum quality, and allow users input into the development process.

“Quark customers have the chance to test drive the software themselves, and provide feedback and technical issues to Quark before it ships the software, in order to ensure reliability, high performance and customer satisfaction.”

QuarkXPress 7 represents the first major revision of the desktop publishing software since 2003, with some of the new features including transparency, drop shadows, and support for Unicode and OpenType.

The other main new feature is its improved collaboration functionality. Several users can now work on the same page at the same time, cutting the downtime associated with users waiting around for other people involved with a project to finish working on a particular page.

“Customers in pre-release testing have notice significant time savings, citing that QuarkXPress 7 is making it exciting to create again,” says Gukhool. “The increased collaboration in particular makes it easy for creative teams to work together on world-class design.”

Readers interested in checking out the beta of QuarkXPress 7 should visit the following website to sign up for the release.