Back to Blogging ~ Quark

So, it has been quite some time since I have been blogging. I used to keep a journal and would write in it everyday, but for some reason I have stopped in the past year or so. I decided I wanted to get back into writing more frequently but thought this time, why not try posting it online? Perhaps from my writings I can generate something productive and useful to others out there on the WWW. So where to start? Well how about with something that has been of interest to me lately, iPad publishing. Its awesome. Everything about it. The more I use tablet computers, the more I get excited. The new capabilities that come with this groundbreaking technology is revolutionary. Not only is it a medium which users can access their favorite apps, but it is creating an entirely new realm of publishing.  Not only are publishers now concerned about the content that is on their pages like images and text, but interactivity is key! When preparing documents for iPads and other tablet computers, designers must be clever with not only what they put on their page, but how they do it. But only having awesome interactive elements is enough, as users must be able to understand where the interactivity exists. With ePub, designers must be prepared to ask questions like "how will a new user know how to interact with this document?" I have had to ask these questions recently as I am currently learning to use QuarkXpress 9

While learning to use this software, I went through these mood changes of love and hate with the software. At first, I was pumped. I was like "THIS IS GOING TO BE AMAZING!" Having so many variables to work with, being able to be super creative, this was it! So as I started stumbling along my way of learning to use the software, I started having some hiccups in that I couldn't find how to do certain things I really wanted. For example, my first instinct was to create a document that scrolled page to page horizontally when the iPad was horizontal, but then scrolled up and down for my vertical slides. I emailed a very helpful employee at Quark, who I had met a few weeks ago at R.I.T, about my problem and he told me this was the nature of the software and there was a roundabout way of doing it that involved creating a box that was the entire of the page and then creating the separate pages in that box that scroll up and down. So this was a bit frustrating, but I see where they are coming from, its new stuff and they are trying to work out some kinks. As I continued using the software, I began encountering other problems. For example, I had some slideshows set up in my document. But how are users to know that its a slideshow if it looks just like a plain old picture? So I wanted to add little slightly transparent bubbles in the slideshow that showed you that not only it was a slideshow, but how many pictures were in the slideshow and which one you were on. Turns out this is not possible unless you have an automatic slideshow set up... Also, once you have created a digital print for the iPad, you can not just simply download it and view it. The user must also have Quark's app on their machine before they can download the .zave file. This makes the functionality of the process even more complicated and the content less valuable there is no way the audience it will reach can be very great. All in all, I still have a ways to go with learning the Quark software, but I definitely think there are some areas they must address before this can become a widely accepted platform for digital publishing. And also they must figure out a way so that content users create can be easily distributed to iPad owners all over.