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
