[Scribus] Quark 7

[Asif Lodhi]

Hi Christoph,

On 3/6/06, Christoph Sch?fer <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de> wrote:
> http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1858731,00.asp
> It seems they have been reading the discussions on this list here carefully ;)

Ya ;)  Collaboration is the name of the game.  Basically, data-comm
hardware has advanced substantially as compared to computer-hardware
when it comes to performance/speed and, in my humble opinion, the
DTP/Design work in most networked environments doesn't maximize the
network-utilization which remains, well, mostly idle!  Basically, the
network links transfer data to/from computers comparatively at more
speeds than the computers do processing - that effectively brings the
network to an 'empty' wait-state.  Quark seems to be utilizing this
very opportunity with some kind of a peer-to-peer message-passing
mechanism to synchronize all the computers on the network - so that
different DTP users can see the changes the other users are making to
the same document/project.  Though I have never even seen Quark but I
guess that if it has such a synchronizing functionality then it may
also have a CVS-like, but 'distributed',  history functionality so
that the users can also 'rewind' their work to a previous stage.  As I
said in one of my earlier posts to this list, it's good to think in
terms of a 'strategy pattern' when it comes to DTP - it's the same
pattern whether it's software development, DTP or whatever - it's
about synchronizing the changes and keeping history in different
domains - DTP, software development, graphics design, etc.  Quark has
added this 'horizontal' synchronization feature to their product.  I
can see that other competitors will soon follow.  Basically,
collaboration is also happening in other arenas as well - Sun has
added significant collab features in their enterprise studio,
Microsoft has done the same in their 2005 Visual Studio product, etc. 
The name of the game is 'maximizing the network utilization' and
de-centralization/distribution instead of centralization (e.g. CVS).

Thanks for the very good link (publish.com).

--
Best regards,

Asif