Today, we take for granted the powerful and easy way our Mac software works. We only scratch the surface of an application's capabilities and never need to call on the full range of facilities on offer.

Some Mac applications have been around for ten years, continually improving year by year. Take Freehand and QuarkXPress for example, their first versions appeared when the Mac was only five years old. Both have become industry-standard, cross-platform tools used by millions and both have just been upgraded.

Newly released Freehand 8 is a further advance in the numbers game Macromedia plays. When they created Freehand 7 Macromedia thought it was so good that they decided to increment the version's name by one extra digit from 6 to 7. The fact that Freehand's rival, Adobe Illustrator, was already at version 6 had no bearing on Macromedia's decision. Macromedia's latest incarnation of Freehand could have been named version 9 because it too is much better than its predecessors. With a host of new features and the user-interface tidied up, Freehand 8 is fast, stable and extremely usable, becoming a major threat to one of the acknowledged leaders in page layout software, QuarkXPress.

For all Freehand's strengths, most designers will still turn to QuarkXPress for designs, using Freehand as a tool to make illustrations for import into XPress. Quark have recognized this and after years of taking "wish lists" from their users, have produced the first major upgrade since the Mac 11ci was considered state of the art computing.

The original XPress had been designed by people who knew about typography and printing. This has been further extended in XPress 4 especially in color and image control with a steep learning curve to use the new effects. The introduction of clipping paths opens whole new ways to blend type and graphics which we will all be seeing shortly since just about every magazine we see is currently made with XPress.

Just as Freehand 8 challenges XPress as a page layout package, XPress has picked up many of the features of Freehand to become an all-round design and layout application. That is, in all features except the most important one, QuarkXPress 4 crashes. It has at least one never-fail way to make it crash and loads of suspected ways to make it fall-over. This is even after a recent upgrade to solve some of the bugs it was issued with.
The constant crashing is not a limited phenomena either judging by the comments of the XPress mailing list where users around the world are asking why Quark, who have been preparing this major new upgrade for many years, issued a piece of software which seems so unstable?

 












Mark Tennent.
Send your comments to:
mark@tennent.co.uk