From Quark's open-source QuarkXPress Markup Language to Bare Bones' upgraded text editor, third-party developers use the Macworld show to roll out products for the world of graphic designers and pre-press.SAN
FRANCISCO—Though this year's Macworld Expo here had a definite focus on consumer
hardware, many third-party developers used the occasion to show off applications
designed for print professionals on the Mac OS X platform.
And while the overall market share for
Apple Computer Inc.'s operating system remains second to Microsoft Corp.'s
Windows in many markets, it remains the standard in the world of graphic
designers and pre-press.
Denver-based Quark Inc. revealed QXML
(QuarkXPress Markup Language), which the company claims is an open-source XML
language that works with the standard DOM (Document Object Model).
The company claims that this eases
creation of Xtensions in Java, AppleScript or Perl. The QXML language also
describes QuarkXPress projects as an XML tree; this allows edits to the XML file
to change the QuarkXPress project in real time.
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Sausalito, Calif.-based Equilibrium
announced DeBabelizer Pro 6, the latest version of the company's automated media
processing software that can import, edit, optimize and convert most types of
media.
It will work with Mac OS X 10.4's new
Automator application and will support Adobe Photoshop CS layers. It will ship
in the first quarter of 2005 for $399.99.
Bedford, Mass.-based Bare Bones
Software Inc. announced not only an upgraded version of its general-purpose text
editor, TextWrangler 2.0, but also that it would be released for free to
users.
New to Version 2.0 is the ability to
color syntax, support for SFTP, and user interface enhancements including a
navigation bar and a documents drawer.
X-Rite, with North American
headquarters in Grandville, Mich., showed off its new Pulse ColorElite System,
which helps create accurate color profiles for digital devices such as monitors,
scanners, digital cameras and printers.
Insider Software Inc. of Los Gatos,
Calif., released Font Agent Pro 3, which adds live searching and filtering of
font metadata, configurable startup sets, a setup wizard, WYSIWYG font views and
more to the $99.95 font management utility. Upgrades from earlier versions are
$49.95. There is also a workgroup edition available for $129.95, with upgrades
for $64.95.
New from Electronics for Imaging Inc.,
based in Foster City, Calif., are new versions of the Splash G640 and Splash
G3535 servers.
In addition to improved printing speed,
the two products add support for PDF 1.5, native OS X AppleTalk and LPR
spooling, and the EFI Format Converter. The Splash G640 works with Xerox's
DocuColor 12 copier-printer, while the Splash G3535 is designed for the Xerox
DocuColor 3535 copier-printer.
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Mindwrap Inc., of Flint Hill, Va.,
showed Optix Server 7, a new version of the company's cross-platform,
Internet-accessible document management system. The update features improved
metadata handling, better logging handling and better client services through
Optix Web.
The company also introduced ScanTango,
a $149 document scanning tool that supports automatic conversion of paper to PDF
and TIFF files, as well as two-sided scanning.
Portland, Ore.-based SmileOnMyMac
introduced PDFpenPro and PDFpen 2.0. The latter adds the ability to fill out
forms as well as to search and highlight text to the $49.95 utility for editing
PDF files.
The $94.95 PDFpenPro adds to PDFpen's
features by allowing the creation of cross-platform PDF documents with fields
that can be filled out by recipients.
Document Management 
