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Quark Interactive Designer

As I was saying in a post about Abobe's "Flash Catalyst," someone should have made an easy- to- use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Flash-like application years ago, as in the year 2000 or 2001.

The closest thing I have seen to such a WYSIWYG application that can output .swf files would be Swish and Fly Paper.

Even though I learned Action Script 2 (I would say I'm towards the 'intermediate' level of the spectrum, or am getting to that point), it is my view that graphic artists should not have to learn, or even have a passing familiarity with, scripting or programming, including Action Script.

(Microsoft's Silverlight is not a solution, since it, like Flash, apparently requires the use of a scripting language as well, if my understanding is correct.)

About three years ago, QID (Quark Interactive Designer) was released, and it is an attempt at a Flash-like WYSIWYG package.

Quark Interactive Designer 1.0 - review from MacWorld

Excerpt from MacWorld review:

This program has a simple and straightforward interface and concept, and it works very well for creating presentations, interactive tours, online ads and banners, or for converting your pages into a Web site complete with multimedia content. You can also use QuID to create familiar elements such as rollover navigation bars, disjointed rollovers, and animations without any coding, programming, or scripting knowledge.

While the vast majority of designers will be satisfied with the basic actions that QuID supplies (and you’ll need to consult the manual or video to understand how to use them—they are not self-explanatory) some designers will need additional complex effects that are more technically difficult to produce. Nonetheless, compared to Flash, QuID is still much easier to learn and use.

A long quest for a simple, easy-to-learn Flash program is over. Or is it?

Excerpts from the above page:

Quark Enters the Flash Market

Quark Interactive Designer (called QID for the rest of this review) is the latest addition to the QuarkXPress 7 bundle of tricks.

Although you buy QID as an individual product, you must also have a copy of QuarkXPress 7.02 installed. (This is similar to the requirements of QuarkImmedia, the long-defunct multimedia predecessor of QID.) You then launch XPress as usual.

....With QID's flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve--a little bit more of a learning curve than I expected. And there's no summary where you can see all the controls that have been applied to an object. There were too many times I found myself wondering why nothing was happening when I went to preview my presentation.

....Given that the whole point of QID is supposed to be its simple learning curve (using the tools you already know in QuarkXpress), I was disappointed in things that were unnecessarily complicated. QID has tools to let you build sophisticated interfaces, but it fails to help you do so easily or quickly.