MacAddict's reviewer gives qualified "thumbs up" to the XPress 6.5 update
In a review published in the April 2005 number of Mac Addict magazine and not yet available online, reviewer John Cruise rings in a strong positive review of QuarkXPress’s 6.5 update.
“Good News: Can’t beat the upgrade price. Nice set of image-editing features. Can import native Photoshop files. Bad News: PSD Import XTension is buggy and limited. Doesn’t support layer effects in Photoshop files,” says the reviewer’s summary. Overall rating on the magazine’s scale is 4 out of 5, or “Great.”
The review concerns itself, in the main, with the QuarkVista and PSD Import XTensions. Citrix XP support and grouping tables with other items get a passing sentence. Bugs with the PSD Import that are mentioned are left and right edge artifacts on simple images, and unexpected flattening of some imported files, including those with layer effects, on import. It also mentioned the screen-redraw delay that was referred to in my January review on this site.
In all it is a postive review that gives Quark credit where due. My opinion is that Vista and PSD Import were, while long overdue, very necessary, and the review seems to echo that, calling it a “significant update.”
The bottom line of Mac Addict’s review largely seems to hold with the conventional wisdom expressed here and throughout the industry: While the update is significant, there is a feature gap that has InDesign in the lead. XPress 6.5 may slow migration to Adobe CS, but the make-or-break point will be QuarkXPress 7.0.