Review: Quark Interactive Designer
- Article 30 of 89
- MacFormat, December 2006
Quark tries to crack the new media market again – and doesn’t do a bad job for once.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages
With a program like QID, however, the make-or-break point is the output. You can include the interactive content as Flash movies in the web pages that XPress can export or you can export them as pure SWF movies. These can be created at any point using the Preview option, so you know how the project is progressing. The SWF option also allows you to export the movie with an embedded Flash projector for either OS X or Windows. Slightly disappointingly, if you embed videos, these can only be exported in Flash 6/7 format, not Flash 8, and they’ll be exported as separate files, not kept within the main SWF file. The Mac projector is a PowerPC, not a Universal app, too. Equally, the HTML can’t be tweaked within Quark, only after export. But these are minor niggles.
At the current pricing of £81 (until April 2007), QID isn’t even a third of Flash’s price tag yet is still pretty powerful. It’s easy to learn and to use, although you’ll need to think differently to get to grips with the concepts of interactivity. There are a few kinks in it, something to be expected in a 1.0 release, but for anyone who knows QuarkXPress, could never get to grips with Flash and doesn’t want to be a coder, QID could be just the program they’re looking for.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages