Quark speaks

Posted on 4 Nov 2002 at 15:48

In a rare interview, J?n Kurz, Quark's director of product management, talks to MacUser's Paul Nesbitt.

The non-appearance of a Mac OS X version of QuarkXPress has been fuelling an ever more lurid spate of rumours as to what exactly Quark is up to. XPress is by far the most important Mac application not to embrace Mac OS X, and this state of affairs has even been blamed for the slow sales of Apple's Power Mac range.

There have been whispers that the company had a bust up with Apple, after the Mac maker supposedly refused to help bankroll development of a Mac OS X-compatible version of XPress 5.0, leading Quark to pull the plug on the project. Development, on Quark 6, a Mac OS X-only version of the product only recommenced this summer, goes the rumour. None of this is true, according to J?n Kurz, director of product management at Quark, who spoke to MacUser in a rare interview to clear the air.

MacUser: OK, when is XPress 6 going to arrive, and why has it taken so long?

J?n Kurz: We generally like to keep complete quiet over release dates. We were rightly ripped apart after we released version 4.0 and it wasn't ready. That was because we promised it for a certain date, and we're not going to get burnt again.

MU: Give us a clue!

JG: OK, it could be as early as March, but quality not timing will dictate its appearance, and that could mean this summer. You see, XPress is a mission-critical program, which has to work with lots of other technologies from the desktop to the printing press. We have to get it exactly right. It must be a reliable workhorse. This is not CorelDraw!

MU: We hear that Apple is going nuts waiting for you to move to Mac OS X. You're holding up arguably Apple's single most important customer base from buying Macs.

JG: Apple would love us to ship a Mac OS X XPress yesterday. Sure I understand that they are under pressure. They've not had a good quarter. They've been very helpful in giving us technical help to get XPress 6 out.

MU: It sounds like you have Apple over a barrel. Is Apple helping pay for the development of XPress 6 for Mac OS X?

JG: No!

MU: Is it true that Steve Jobs and Fred Ebrahimi [Quark president and CEO] had a bust up about the non-appearance of XPress 6?

JG: Well as you know both men are known to be very emotional about their products, but I wouldn't say they had a bust up. No.

MU: Will XPress 6 mainly be a port to Mac OS X and with a largely unchanged feature set, or will there be new features?

JG: There will be some exciting new stuff, like full support for PostScript 3 RIPs and smooth shading. Let me also point out that this is a complete rewrite to take full advantage of Mac OS X. We're taking time over details so that XPress 6 will be fast and very stable. We are always hearing people complain that they 'can't use Adobe InDesign when a document has more than 20 pages.' We are also going to implement cross media XML, CTP [computer to plate] features, and integrated PDF-based job ticketing.

MU: Apple's decision to make all Macs from January only boot up into Mac OS X means that until you release XPress 6, there will be no version of XPress which can run natively on a Mac. Does that worry you?

JG: I think that's a decision which could alienate some of Apple's customers. It's not our fault if they want to do that. And XPress 5 runs in Classic really well.

MU: Upgrading to Mac OS X is not going to be cheap and when you factor in XPress, which is not cheap either, aren't you going to find a lot of customers are reluctant to make the move to XPress 6?