Quark has just announced that v6.0 will be shipping next week. The
street price is $890; those with earlier versions are entitled to a variety of
discounts to upgrade.
As with all new Adobe products, this upgrade *requires* Mac OS 10.2
(Jaguar). It will not run under System 9.x. You can live with that or not, but you should be aware that there's a major change in copy protection that many people will not like.
Unlike previous versions, you'll have to activate this one thru Quark,
which will issue a code that will lock the software to your hard drive, so
that, unless you feel like doing substantial hacking, you would not be able to
copy the software permanently to another machine, although apparently you can install at least once per machine for five days before it goes into demo mode.
Most vendors other than Quark have at least privately accepted the idea
that they're selling software to a single user, not a single computer. Thus,
it's quite common for a person to have the same software installed in the
office, at home, and on a laptop, understanding that only one could be in use at any one time. Quark has previously stated that this practice is piracy, and that anyone doing it should instead delete the software from their home
computer and reinstall it on their laptop before going on a business trip and then reverse the process upon return. The new copy scheme apparently won't even permit *that*.
While obviously we don't know yet how reliable the protection software
is, previous attempts to do this by other vendors have been flaky, causing
the software to become disabled if RAM is added or you plug in a new
peripheral or, in some cases, if you merely defragment the hard drive. Plus, it's entirely reasonable to think that we might wish to reinstall Quark 6 on a new computer in, say, 2008. Will Quark still be in business to generate the necessary activation code, or, better yet, will it then say that you have to buy a new version because Quark 6 is no longer supported?
Anyhow, if you customarily run software on more than one machine, you
need to be aware of the issue before upgrading to Quark 6.