This Thursday Quark, realeased there long awaited Quark 8, ahead of Adobe offering of CS4

Quark 7 was a massive improvement on previous versions and was a good step into the right direction, but to some including me it was not far enough and lacked details that seamed essential for a fight back to the top against the ever marching army of Adobe.

Quark needs this to get back in the game after loosing there footing to Indesign by not releasing native OSX support.

From the official Quark site this looks to be a superb offering and a complete change of direction in the software, with massive changes to the tool bar and improvements to the hole user experience.

Quark 8 Features:

Feel the excitement of design!

Intuitively place, scale, rotate, and offset images easily using the new Picture Content tool — no need to switch tools or enter numbers in a palette or dialog box. You can even see a visual preview as you crop an image!

Draw brand new illustrations directly in QuarkXPress 8 with the redefined Bézier Pen tool — just like you do in Illustrator® and other major graphics applications. Most importantly, you can focus on the task at hand because we’ve separated illustration tools from the tools you use for basic page-layout tasks.

Easy Page Layout with Drag and Drop

Little things make a big difference — we think you’ll love the way we handle drag and drop.

Design as quickly and fluidly as your ideas. When you move your text or picture content to the page, the box is automatically created — no need to pre-define boxes!

You can drag text and pictures from your desktop, Adobe® Bridge, iP®, or any other application that supports drag and drop, and your box is created for you. You can even drag picture boxes from QuarkXPress to your graphics application to customize your images.

Streamlined Tools with Familiar Keyboard Controls

We’ve streamlined and simplified our Tools palette, so the tools do more and it’s easier to choose the right one. Even familiar tools like the Item and Content tools get major boosts. For example, you can rotate any box simply by grabbing its corner.

You’ll also enjoy single-key commands — consistent with familiar applications such as Photoshop® — to select tools, as well as keyboard modifiers for duplicating, scaling from center, and performing other common tasks.

By aligning with your other mission-critical tools, while keeping everything you love, QuarkXPress gives you the best of both worlds!

Design and Output Flash (SWF) Directly from QuarkXPress

Page-layout professionals can create rich Flash® projects — without compromising design — using the built-in Flash authoring capabilities included in every edition of QuarkXPress® 8.

Working in the same, familiar print environment of QuarkXPress 8, you can take existing print jobs to Flash, or create new Flash projects, in minutes — no additional purchase or coding required! Interactive design in QuarkXPress 8 includes support for all of the new typographic features, the improved illustration (pen) tool set, full integration with Item Styles and other features, and support for more than 30 languages, including East Asian scripts. No other page-layout application gives you such advanced design capabilities that you can apply directly and easily to Flash design!

Create Stunning Text and Achieve the Effects you Want with Hanging Characters

QuarkXPress® 8 offers easy-to-use, precise, and fully customizable control for hanging characters. You can control the look of your text margin alignment by quickly applying preloaded settings for Hanging Punctuation and Punctuation Margin Alignment. And only QuarkXPress 8 offers the ability to apply your settings at the paragraph level, so settings don’t have to apply to an entire story. You can even include the hanging characters setting as part of a style sheet.

But our settings are just the beginning. You can build your own settings to precisely define the hang of any character you choose, including drop caps, to create the design effects that work for you.

For more details and the full list of new features: http://8.quark.com/