Do you feel a chill?
I'm not going to go on and on with this, but I have a confession to make.
Today I had my first chance to run InDesignCS2. I'm a long time XPress user -- on a Mac -- and using InDesign on the PC was a daunting thought. At work today I had to use it, so no more procrastinating. It is totally and completely awesome. It has to be the single best application on the Windows platform.
It was an amazing experience. The first thing I noticed was how cool the palettes are. They slide out of the side of the window, and it's really slick. The second thing I noticed is that type is anti-aliased. On Windows. Anti-aliased type. That right there is enough for me. But lo, many of keyboard shortcuts were the same too! It was intuitive! Text editing was intuitive! That's a welcome thing on a Windows box where you never know what different keys are going to do while editing text. (Really. Don't believe me? You'd be surprised to learn that the Page Down key doesn't always work on Windows. nor Home, nor End, but I digress). Images are handled a little differently, but it didn't take long to figure it out (sort of). Transparency, drop shadows, feathering, and powerful gradient support were all simply amazing. I'd like to see more of Illustrator's Effects built into InDesign, but who cares. Everything it does it does right. I love it.
The icing on the cake? Alt-8 made bullets. Oh, how I missed that. I am thrilled. Elated in fact. A bit remorseful that I discovered the majesty of InDesign now that I work primarily on the web, but excited about the medium again -- and InDesign -- none the less.
If you're still using Quark Xpress, you have my condolences. InDesign is the new XPress.
- under:
- Art and Design
- Posted on
- 2005-11-17
Comments:
Hate to say we told you so
has been for awhile man, haven't touched quark for 8months+
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