Quark announced Quark Labs, a new portal featuring QuarkXPress 7 XTensions that are not initially being released as commercial products. Designed as a testing ground for QuarkXPress technology and a community for QuarkXPress users and developers, Quark Labs offers free access to technology previews, proofs of concept and both new and familiar XTensions. Upon our first visit, we found Quark Labs suspiciously reminiscent of Adobe Labs.

The new XTensions featured on Quark Labs are built to enhance a user’s experience with QuarkXPress 7 and increase productivity by automating common user actions. The XTensions on Quark Labs include Welcome Screen, Image Drag and Drop 1.0b, and ShadowCaster 3.3. 

The Welcome Screen XTension is a navigation screen that appears immediately upon launching QuarkXPress 7. It allows users to open recent projects, create new projects, create new libraries and more without clicking through a variety of menus or options. Welcome Screen also features training videos, an RSS feed of Quark-related news and is currently available for English-language Mac environments. Again, with Welcome Screen, Quark seems to have looked at Adobe and what they are doing with the Indesign Welcome Screen. Personally, I don’t find it a big improvement, but of course, you’re under no obligation to use the XTension. You can throw it out of the XTension folder just as fast as it got in.

Image Drag and Drop 1.0b: A long-time wish-list item for QuarkXPress users debuts as a technology preview on the site. Image Drag and Drop 1.0b allows users to drag images from almost anywhere - folders, their desktop - and drop them into a QuarkXPress 7 document. The source code for this technology preview will also be available on the site. If users are allowed to edit the code, and Quark is clever enough to really support efforts from its user community, I am sure the Image Drag and Drop XTension will become an all-time favourite.

I tried it, and I succeeded at dropping four images on a page while simultaneously creating the required image boxes. But as soon as I tried to repeat the action, the application crashed. Being a beta, I found myself lucky that it worked at all. As it is now, the XTension will drop all your images at once. To get the same comfort level as InDesign CS3 users enjoy, the XTension will have to be adapted so it will let you drop images one by one --better yet: give users a choice in the form of preferences!

Quark Reaches Out

ShadowCaster 3.3: One of the most popular QuarkXPress XTensions of all time, ShadowCaster adds transparency, blend modes and special effects such as shadows, glows and bevels to QuarkXPress layouts. Version 3.3 is compatible with QuarkXPress 7, but made my copy crash as soon as I tried to use it. I don’t know if it is still beta, but the XTension is not production-ready at this point. It is also unclear to me what the benefits of the plug-in are, except for the fact that you don’t have to use Photoshop. The effects of the XTension are not applied “live” to objects as far as I could make out, but the text or object you want the effect to apply to has to be rasterised first, and is then placed on the page.

This is not what I would expect and although I love the promise of ShadowCaster, I don’t believe many people will become wild of the way it’s been implemented as it is now.

In addition to access to new and emerging XTensions that are not available elsewhere, Quark Labs offers users and developers a way to communicate with the Quark developers who are creating new software for QuarkXPress 7. Visitors can implement and test XTensions concepts and provide both constructive and critical feedback. Hopefully they will do that in large numbers, and hopefully the developers will listen carefully to their users and come up with solutions they want fast. 

In my opinion, Quark Labs, when done right, could well be the most important “feature” of QuarkXPress to counter the ever growing market share that InDesign keeps claiming. In spite of what some people believe, I am not biased towards QuarkXPress or InDesign at all. I only believe there’s no reason to have a strong desire for InDesign to become the one and only desktop layout solution in the market. We have enough monopolistic players in this IT industry as it is, and if we can learn one thing from those monopolistic players it is that they develop crap that only serves to earn them more money and generate more user problems for which they then can offer a new “solution”.

Adobe luckily still isn’t a monopolistic player, although it’s working hard to become one. Luckily for creative users, Adobe still listens to its users and will do its best to provide them with good software that helps them create. Perhaps this is an inherent characteristic of a developer of creative software: that he has to listen to what users want in order not to have those creative users in turn create crappy design.

Quark has announced that Quark Labs will be updated continually with new technology previews, concepts and XTensions. In the near future updates to the site will include enhancements for the Mac OS experience as well as third-party application compatibility add-ons. A QuickLook plug-in and Leopard-compatible Spotlight plug-in have already been added.