SAN FRANCISCO—Though this years 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.
Sausalito, Calif.-based Equilibrium announced DeBabelizer Pro 6, the latest version of the companys automated media processing software that can import, edit, optimize and convert most types of media.
It will work with Mac OS X 10.4s 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 Xeroxs DocuColor 12 copier-printer, while the Splash G3535 is designed for the Xerox DocuColor 3535 copier-printer.
Mindwrap Inc., of Flint Hill, Va., showed Optix Server 7, a new version of the companys 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 PDFpens features by allowing the creation of cross-platform PDF documents with fields that can be filled out by recipients.