Should I buy an Apple laptop?

Pro Tools does run on Windows.

-- libcrypt, Tuesday, 29 April 2008 02:09 (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Which is why I'm getting a Windows machine.

Jon, just lack of familiarity.

i don't understand why you'd post on this thread if you want to use pc-specific software and don't know how to use a mac. ya, we get it, you're not gonna get a mac.

Pro Tools runs on Macs as well. Just not the new OS yet

Sorry for using a thread titled 'Should I buy an Apple laptop?' for musing about whether or not I should buy an Apple laptop.

I could sell you my clamshell, which runs 9.3.

Naughty.

didn't know that about ProTools, that's pretty ridiculous. The history or ProTools dates back to mac-centric software. Sound Designer, SD II, Audiomedia...

Quark 3.32 basically does everything you need. Nice little program.

nah...InDesign does so many amazing things, it's really hard to go back. I mean, once you've grabbed a dozen images from your desktop and dragged them into a layout, dropping them into multiple frames one at a time, with each frame already set to fit the images...makes it really hard to go back to Quark.

Actually my part-time job, the one that pays most of the rent, they're still on Quark 6.5.

Pro tools will take ages to appear for leopard as Avid/Digidesign remain eternally grumpy that apple destroyed its happy monopoly on mid-range video editing. They also lost a tonne of money last year, a lo of it from digidesign as so many other products can now do significant chunks of what ProTools can do. (they also lost a tonne of money through their arrogance and generally pissing of key people they should be working with in the video industry).

for hand:

http://gizmodo.com/384526/exclusive-video-psystar-in-the-wild

The entire industry is lurching towards InDesign, some places more quickly then others, but Quark 6 (or 4) on a Mac is still the only thing most print designers are comfortable working with.

Depends who you ask. I work for a large commercial printer and we've banned Quark completely. After fighting with Quark's post-version 3 products I believe this is a sound decision.

Maybe it's because I'm youngish, but I only know one person who still uses Quark compared to maybe 10 InD users.

I emailed the prepress guy at our printer and asked him what percentage of jobs they get in ID vs. QXP, just out of curiosity. Will report the answer tomorrow. He may not know for sure, since jobs come in to them as press-ready PDFs usually now.

I haven't touched QXP in about 5 years.

For what it's worth, I speak as somebody who's freelanced at many agencies of different sizes doing Mac production work for the better part of the last 10 years. Many of the larger and older companies are still using Quark because they're so accustomed to basically just picking up old files and modifying them. I don't know how well the Markzware Quark to Indesign utility is selling, or how well it works, I'm sure it's better then what I've had to do a few years back which involved saving Quark files back to 5, then to 4 just to open in InDesign CS and CS2. That and older art directors are still loathe to learn a new program. Trust me, I'm no fan, although I work much faster in Quark (10+ years of use will do that) and I think InDesign has a few really stupid techniques, but they're way overcome by the great features.

I'm sure young people getting into design now are learning with InDesign, but every place I've worked in the last 5 years have all still been Quark, and that includes 2 of the big 10 advertising firms, several small and medium sized general and pharm. advertising firms, 1 major newspaper of record, and the internal studio of 1 major leather goods designer.

Pro tools will take ages to appear for leopard as Avid/Digidesign remain eternally grumpy that apple destroyed its happy monopoly on mid-range video editing. They also lost a tonne of money last year, a lo of it from digidesign as so many other products can now do significant chunks of what ProTools can do. (they also lost a tonne of money through their arrogance and generally pissing of key people they should be working with in the video industry).

any actual facts to back this apparent total speculation up?

also yeah companies really dig pissing off/alienating a large part of their customer base to 'get back' at a company that already took a great deal of its market share. for fuck's sake.

lots of bad engineering decisions made by adobe et al

Option to use Logic instead of Pro Tools now on the table, and IT dude recommends a higher end Acer or Fujitsu over Dell.

FFS, why can't I hand in work on 4track cassette.

logic mac only, i really dislike it as a daw but some people are all over it

Rumor has it Quark wasn't going to be OSX compatible until a certain sometime ILXor and her friend, who's father may run Quark told said father he was nuts. Quark would be ancient history by now if they hadn't.

I use Performer, fwiw. Since version 3 on a Mac Plus.

It's amazing how industries can shift...Opcode Studio Vision was first with digital audio and almost completely knocked Performer out of the game, but MOTU came out with the 2408 interface, first real low-cost multi-channel interface. Where's Vision now?

i remember opcode - you had to get the damn drivers in order to do anything with protools

Heard back from my contact at the printer -- he said that more and more jobs are coming in as PDFs, but the ones that are native files are 70% ID, 30% QXP.

my girlfriend, who runs the the student graphic design firm on our campus, uses indesign exclusively for layout. very few of the design jobs shes applying for require quark knowledge... not that this contradicts anything anyones been saying, but even my quark-loving dad has switched to indesign, not that he does layout anymore at all

I like Logic quite a bit, although I'm more familiar with Pro Tools. If you have issues with Macs being "overpriced", though, then you gotta have a massive hate-on for Digi.

^ i do

One of the nifty things about Logic is that you can use a (not-too) old Mac as a DSP farm. Conversely with Pro Tools, you can trade in yr first-born to Digi to get more DSP action.

logic mac only, i really dislike it as a daw but some people are all over it

To overgeneralize, I've found that Logic is great for composition while ProTools' strength is straight-up multitrack recording.

Also, I haven't upgraded to Logic 8 yet so that difference may not exist

logic you fucks! behead the infidels!

i still fuck w/quark a lot - tho i wouldnt start a new project w/it it

ive used the markzware quark to indesign utility a little bit and it seems really good - tho my testing has been by no means exhaustive

I think all the smaller and sharper shops have already switched to ID, it's the bigger older agencies with years and years of archives and stodgy creatives who are holding on. I didn't take InDesign seriously until my friend who started a really hip 2 person design firm with very cool clients said he never uses Quark anymore. Still, the freelance agencies in NY and the types of firms they place people at, as mentioned all the big advertising firms, are still stuck with it. Personally, I can't wait till everyplace switches so I can get as good at ID as I am with Quark, and am hoping I'm just not quite fluent enough with ID, as some of how ID works seems a bit more painful then it needs to be, all the stuff with selecting the container vs the content, the Paste Into command, gets overly complicated. I've tried creating key commands to make it faster to a little success.

Option to use Logic instead of Pro Tools now on the table, and IT dude recommends a higher end Acer or Fujitsu over Dell.

I'd suggest HP.

People like Thinkpads too, but my boss (video production) uses HP. (His next computer is a Mac)

a certain sometime ILXor and her friend, who's father may run Quark told said father he was nuts.
wau!

We're about to switch to InDesign at my office, and if we're doing it that means pretty much everybody else already has. Jon's right that Adobe's made lots of bad engineering decisions, but Quark were bafflingly bad at responding to users or updating their apps. I once saw an list of the wont-fix bugs in 4.1, and it was epic.

I've got one of the tiny thinkpads, and really like it a lot. The hardware's solid as hell and the battery goes forever.

how ID works seems a bit more painful
It's got a largely different metaphor from Quark, which took me a while to understand. Now I grok where it's coming from (Illustrator meets Pagemaker, kinda) I get on a lot better with it.

For me the learning curve was about ten days and the comfort curve was about two months.

To overgeneralize, I've found that Logic is great for composition MIDI while ProTools' strength is straight-up multitrack recording absolute market dominance.

The more I use Logic (8), the more I like it, crazy keyboard mappings notwithstanding.

I mean, WTF: <esc> brings up a menu????

I have remapped that, by the way.

pretty much everybody else already has

I WILL REPEAT...NOT EVERYBODY HAS! The last 4 places I've worked in the last 2 or 3 years have all been Quark. I know a lot can change in 2 years, but the place I am still is still Quark, and it's a pretty large operation.

I'm pretty good with InDesign, there's just this one major technique that keeps feeling awkward to me, likely because I'm still using Quark at the same time and it gets frustrating to go back and forth. I won't set InDesign to use Quark key commands because in the long-run I think that'll be lazy and I'd rather just get used to InDesign, not to mention having them consistent with other Adobe products. My main personal issue is that InDesign makes it so easy putting almost every command on a palette that I'm not learning keycommands. With Quark, I can like, layout a book without touching the mouse.

I just think switching between frame and content by using key commands to switch between frame and content tools in quark is quicker and more logical than switching between select and direct select and using that weird "container" button on InDesign.

Yeh, I didn't mean to argue with yr point, just mean that our lot moving to anything being a really strong sign that a gale is blowing.

That select/direct select thing is part of what I mean about the metaphor. Quark feels like it's trying to create a page in the old paste-up style, while ID feels much more computery.

We're about to switch to InDesign at my office

some of us already have, dude :)

today was day two of indesign (with an atex prestige back end) on windows, coming straight from quark 3 (with a QPS1 back end) on mac os 9. it's been ... interesting.

at the moment it's still a strange mix of novelty and unfamiliarity (which, personally, is going to be fucked right up by the fact i'm actually only working one day between now and may 12) but i'd be enormously surprised if, in a month's time, i wasn't totally converted to indesign.

THAT SAID: windows sucks dick in every dimension, and i fucking loathe it (this is the first time i've had to use it in many, many years). counter-intuitive, half-arsed shit. the thing i loathe most of all is the fact the pointer doesn't disappear once i start typing, the way it has on macs since time immemorial. tiny little thing, but says it all. oh, and how do i change the colour of a folder? WHY, I DOWNLOAD A FUCKING SHAREWARE APP. mother FUCK. the setup we have now, only on OS X, would rock bells.

ALSO WORTH NOTING: comparing quark 3 and indesign ... fuck, what version is it? not the newest, but hey ... anyway, comparing quark 3 to it is obviously grossly unfair -- i mean, for all i know quark 6 could rock all the stuff i'm being impressed by right now and do it a thousand times better. i dunno: i'm only just beginning with it (although we've managed to rock out the pages and be off-stone about the same time as always) so i can't say for sure. right now i couldn't fucking care less, either.

To overgeneralize, I've found that Logic is great for composition while ProTools' strength is straight-up multitrack recording.

this is what i've heard in general too. PT doesn't do midi all that well, even if it has come along way with the last major release. but then i don't need it to.

wait, since when can macs change folder colors?

essential
hot
in progress
cool
personal
project 1
project 2

As somebody who's spent a lot of time with InDesign CS2 and 3, and many years with Quark 6.5 and even dabbled in Quark 7, I can say for sure that InDesign has more features in it's little pinky then Quark can dream of. I'm still impressed enough with drag and drop from the desktop, don't even get me started with Ink Density Previews! For the record, Quark 7 handles one of Quark's traditional drawbacks, which was every single option brought up a dialogue box instead of just letting you do what you need to do...now Quark 7 pops up these little mini-palettes right out of the measurements palatte, it's their solution, their way of avoiding InDesign's major drawback, which is having thousands of palettes floating everywhere. It's pretty slick, but it's not enough.

For the record, Adobe has dealt with InDesign's palette overload with their complete redesign of the user interface in CS3, something I found really annoying at first but now love. The idea now being that palettes more seamlessly pop in and out of the sidebar.

And for anybody who wants to learn Adobe stuff, this website is pretty amazing:

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/

When I got CS3 I sat there and went through a bunch of the videos. A great website, really useful.

i work at an agency and the print team has been trying to move to indesign for over a year and it's been pretty slow going, in part because some of the actual production houses they deal with still only accept quark files.

Quark were bafflingly bad at responding to users or updating their apps. I once saw an list of the wont-fix bugs in 4.1, and it was epic.

Quark threw an amazing amount of programming effort into Xposure (a Photoshop competitor) and Immedia - a poorly-planned multimedia package that was "supposed to leverage the Internet." That was the actual language they used at Macworld in 1996 - I remember asking one of the sales droids there what exactly they meant and they couldn't answer it.

I still remember when Quark 5 (think it was 5) was released at the same time as InDesign 2. Guess which one ran natively on Mac OS X. Quark couldn't answer when they were going native because by then they had fired all their programmers and offshored everything to India.

Somewhere in there, I was doing some consulting work for a large print-shop and ran head-on into the $999-per-seat upgrade price for Quark. In lieu of dropping $30,000 (the Quark rep wouldn't give volume discounts to anything under 50 seats) they switched to ID.

I can't remember if Immedia actually shipped.

This is a reply to esoj, way way up thread.

Avid it has to be said are changing in their attitudes having lost a tonne of money in the last 18 months. This is my experience of avid. I am a broadcast engineer and everywhere I have worked has been a customer, partner, integrator or conpetitor with avid and frequently more than one of those. Currently I work for somewhere where we have one product that competes with one bit of avid and integrates with another and another product that integrates with the avid product we compete against.

Avid have been on the back foot as regards apple for a while now. Xpress on the mac lagged xpress on windows for a long time because avid hated the idea of users having systems with both avid and fcp and then the users forgetting they have avid. Avid also fights tooth and nail to keep apple out of the newsroom, there, there is no newscutter for the mac and never will be because avid don't want anyone getting the idea that they can throw in a few fcp stations for a few extra users and to make sure people stay with newscutter they often throw in iNews for free to seal deals. (There arew fcp newsrooms out there in case anyone is wondering)

In adition to all of this avid have long had closed video standards (the oh so incongruously named Open Media Format). Even since they have transitioned to the truly open standard MXF you still need to either buy their transfer manager or a third party rewrappering tool before it becomes an MXF that anyone else's edit system or video server can actually use.

So, yeah it is conjecture that avid/digidesign deliberately drag their feet deliberately on mac development and tbh they fired a huge bunch of developers last year, however, given the rest of what they get up to I find it plausible.

a propos of nothing much ... stet: i still remember that time you and i found ourselves in a small room with a bloke from quark and DIDN'T HIT HIM IN THE BALLS.

For a while between 5 and 6 most of Quark's updates and new features where al about adding web support and the ability to output html documents from Quark, while InDesign focussed on novel ideas like the ability to preflight documents and preview output separations, i.e., they were actually talking to graphic designers and print production people and listening to what they needed.

not to forget the epic leap between 4 and 5 of ... tables.