Monday 27 September 2010

An Application for Everything . . .

When the Apple Mac first appeared the choice of applications was limited to just a few. Aldus Pagemaker, Aldus Freehand, Cricket Draw, Adobe Illustrator 88, QuarkXpress. Pagemaker and Quark competed to be the standard and, at that time, each had its advantages. Pagemaker was easy to use but a bit coarse in positioning text and by embedding images made for large file sizes. Don't forget that floppy discs were the order of the day. Quark was more precise, a little more complicated to use, but used links to images.

Over the next few years Quark was on a mission to become the industry standard page make-up programme and leapt ahead of Pagemaker. Adobe entered the arena, needing a page make-up application they merged with Aldus, improved Pagemaker a little, and then developed InDesign, which eventually superceded PM.

Freehand and Illustrator were used for drawing logos, graphs, charts etc. Again, Adobe obtained Freehand but eventually opted to concentrate on Illustrator and allow FH to return to Altsys.

Quark, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop have now been developed to the max. They are all probably easier to use and more intuitive, than their predecessors and now there is an application for anything from print to animation and web design.

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