Quark is laying the foundation for future features of its once industry-leading desktop publishing software with the release of its latest version, QuarkXPress 10, which the company claims is ‘thoroughly modernising’ the popular platform.
“This has been a monumental undertaking by the development team to thoroughly modernize QuarkXPress in terms of the application environment, architecture, user interface, and graphics engine,” said Dave White (pictured), chief technology officer for Quark, upon the announcement of the new version of 24 July. “We’re excited not only for this release, but also the foundation that has been put in place for future QuarkXPress features.”
According to Quark, the new version of the graphic design and page layout software is for designers who love print and live digital. QuarkXPress 10 includes Quark’s new Xenon Graphics Engine, Retina display support for Apple Mac Book users, a modern architecture, and over fifty feature enhancements that streamline the design process and improve the design experience.
In fact, every element of QuarkXPress 10 has been optimized to take full advantage of high-resolution Retina displays found on the new Mac Book Pro.
It also continues support for ePub and out-of-the-box HTML5 authoring tools for App StudioTM, the leading cloud-based HTML5 solution for creating award-winning tablet and smartphone experiences.
QuarkXPress 10 is the first version of QuarkXPress to run as a native Cocoa app. Cocoa is the current and preeminent application environment for Mac OS X. Being a Cocoa app brings a number of benefits to QuarkXPress 10, including the ability to leverage the latest OS X features, maximize performance, and rapidly support new OS X releases.
In migrating QuarkXPress to Cocoa, the development team updated half a million lines of code, added 350,000 new lines of code, created more than 500 dialogues and palettes in multiple languages and incorporated 1,300 icons to enable Retina display resolutions.
Quark says that it has engineered a new, state-of-the-art graphics engine from the ground up that will be leveraged across a range of its products, starting with QuarkXPress 10.
The new Xenon Graphics Engine renders rich PDFs, Photoshop and TIFF images, and uses its Adaptive Resolution feature to deliver designers the most appropriate onscreen resolution with maximum performance.
The company says that the difference between viewing pixel and vector files in QuarkXPress 10 versus QuarkXPress 9 is ‘stunning’. The Xenon Graphics Engine enables native and deep understanding of image and vector files , adaptive resolution, rich understanding of PDFs and takes full advantage of the latest processor technology.
Unlike many of Quark’s other recent subscription-only Creative Cloud software releases, the new QuarkXPress 10 package is available as a standard perpetual software licence direct fro Quark and authorized resellers.