Quark opens up the floor to questions

Quark has been operating in a benign spirit of openness lately, especially since its release of Quark 7. And it’s had some pretty positive responses to the release of Quark Interactive Designer 1.0 ( ), its new tool—affectionately known as QID—for converting Quark’s print layouts into interactive Flash projects for your Web site.

Over the past few months, Quark has hosted various forums for users and the press, in an effort to better connect with and gauge the priorities of its target market. And the company is taking another opportunity at Macworld Expo on Tuesday, January 9th at 3:00 p.m. in Media Briefing Room 252.

After giving Expo attendees a few hours to recover from Steve Jobs’ keynote address, Quark’s new president and CEO Ray Schiavone will play host to a “dialogue” with media, customers, and partners. Paul Schmitt, Quark’s vice president of product development, Jürgen Kurz, senior vice president, desktop products, and Richard Pasewark, senior vice president of sales and marketing will be on hand to cheerlead a QID demo by satisfied Quark customer, Factory Design Labs.

This demo marks QID’s trade show debut, and a great opportunity for you to query Quark about its future plans regarding QID and—I’d imagine—just about anything else you’d like to discuss.

Some educated Quark observers are curious about the following:

Since QID looks very similar to QuarkImmedia, how much of QID’s code is actually derived from QuarkImmedia, and will QID support QuarkImmedia files or assets, such as buttons, animations, and so on?

If users import a SWF file into a QID file, will it work properly inside the SWF that QID exports?

Since there are so many things that Flash can do that QID cannot, won&38217;t this turn off designer/developers?

Considering that Adobe cancelled LiveMotion (its Flash development tool) before the Macromedia acquisition, why do you think that Quark will do better, or be able to keep QID up to date with Flash technology?

Will we someday be able to export QID files to other formats, such as Microsoft’s WPF or (eventually) WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), Microsoft’s cross-platform Web presentation technology, which is currently under development?

How does QID fit into Quark’s product strategy for the future—is it part of an effort to expand beyond QuarkXPress itself, or is it a continuation of XPress add-ons in the spirit of QuarkCopyDesk?

There have been many attempts by various vendors to combine print and Web design and production tools, but none have been successful. Does Quark believe that’s because of technology limits, product designs that did not work in the real world, or fundamental differences between print and online media that require a nearly independent creative effort for each medium (and limiting sharing to basic content re-use)?

Those are some questions. Be sure to ask Quark some of yours.