While I agree with David that InDesign has many great features that are better implemented than in Quark, I'm still not willing to commit the time to master a new layout program. After almost 15 years of Quark, I can fly through key commands and shortcuts to build my layouts quickly and efficiently. Whenever I sit down to learn InDesign, I feel hobbled and less productive. And the loose elements on a page still feel like PageMaker to me. Sure, Quark still lacks key features that would make a good app excellent, and the company has a few maddening practices, but the product still delivers what I need to get things done, and it works great under Panther.

Quark is gone. InDesign is just more better. Much more better. InDesign feels like photoshop for text. Razor sharp, instant zoom, hotkeys everywhere for everything. Quark felt Naaaasty. It was all numbers, tabbing running about with the mouse around jaggy text and having to nudge stuff rather than drag it, for MIIILES, and never being able to get your hands on an object, clicking around using CMD ALT SHFT and being eluded. The frame handles were tiny, using the tools was impossible from the keyboard, and the scale tool didn't work properly.

Whereas in InDesign, ALL the hotkeys make more sense, you can look at the document how you're going to end up seeing it, and it actually opens most document types properly. It's compatible. With... like photoshop transparency... Oh dear.

InDesign will happily lay out a magazine in one sitting (provided it's only you calling the shots and that the text is assigned with paragraph style tags).

I used quark solidly, I mean SOLIDLY for years at version 3.3 It was just way better than everything else on a 9600. Nothing else would cope on underpowered hardware. Solid, dependable, zippy.

G5s and 4GB RAM and InDesign is just a very different story. Very very very different story.

Quark really does feel the same as it used to, except you can't use the arrow increments on the Measurements palette.

And the fact that it shares its interface, and ALL its commands with Photoshop and Illustrator, you only have to remember one set, and sometimes the feel is so seamless that you forget which one you're working in, and realise that you're in InDesign not Illustrator. Absolutely game over.

I mean, I had this piece of complicated graphics I was trying to do in Illustrator. I scanned all the stuff at 600dpi at A3, so that I'd be able to use it zoomed in, or scaled down. It was fabric. This was all saved onto an Xserve. I didn't check the filesizes.

Importing the pictures was not cool. 4 or 5 minutes each.

With the 15th or 16th complicated cutout path doing fills in a live traced sketch, Illustrator had made a document that was absolutely locked up. 5 minutes to redraw the screen, and taking about 25 minutes of beachball to save the file. I had about 50 objects I wanted to collage about with my sketch. Oh dear.

Never mind, copy paste InDesign, job done in 30 minutes, and PDF exported and down res-ed to continuous 300dpi. Fabulous.

You can use it like an illustration tool. No more flat vector fills and boring gradients. It sort of mashes Photoshop and Illustrator together as a general purpose raster/vector compositing tool. And it doesn't break your machine.

Oh yeah, and then there's the typography. Words and stuff. Type control. Hmm. InDesign really handles type. Just a bit better than Quark. Actually, a lot better. Hundred times better. Game over.

Ah, almost forgot something... if you do crash it, and I have, trying silly silly things just to see if you could, IT DOESN'T LOSE YOUR WORK! Just load InDesign again.

I've only been in the field for 8 years so I'm not a veteran by any means. But I'm not blind either. I'm convinced that die-hard Quark users wouldn't even have some of the features they now enjoy if it weren't for InDesign challenging Quark's territory. The fact that it took SIX major revisions to get multiple undos in the program speaks volumes to me. I have all three (Quark, ID and Pgmkr) on my work machine, but for my personal machine I wouldn't waste my money on QuarkXpress. I hope InDesign takes the lead someday - I feel it would teach Quark a much needed lesson in humility.

In the early 80's I was working on Compugraphic typesetting systems, when inexpensive (relatively) Macs with PageMaker became the standard. So, I switched to that combo. By the early 90's Quark was ascending to the top, and we went with it. Aldus never seemed to have the development dollars to keep PageMaker up to date, and honestly, Adobe didn't do all that much with it, either. I think that all of the recent management changes at Quark have done nothing to help them produce an up to date package. There are a lot of folks still using Quark because they have to, i.e. QPS, or certain extensions. Quark has a reputation for poor customer service and traditionally high pricing. And the current activation scheme does nothing to change that perception. Adobe has done a fine job in creating an alternative to Quark, they deserve all the success coming their way. Right now, if I were starting from the ground up, I would buy the whole CS package, and never look back. And I am a long time Quark user.
Having said that, I hope that Quark survives. Without any kind of competitive issues, we could see InDesign languish, like PageMaker has. Two lessons from all of this: Quark, get busy and innovate, and Adobe, keep up the good work. I'm glad to see software for my line of work continue to evolve.