Stuffed, Compacted and Doubled

By Mark Tennent in Reader

Posted in QuarkXPress, utilities, Video capture, Apple, Uncategorized on May 19, 2010 at 9:11 am

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Who’d have thought it? Most of the time it just sits there doing very little. Type ‘top’ into Terminal to see it, feet up and half asleep, waiting for us to titillate its silicone synapses. Even doing heavy Photoshopping or similar graphics stuff, the CPU’s use less than 1%.

Currently all eight cores are running at 110% but still leaving room to scribble blogs, check emails, surf the web and so on. They are compressing video as fast as files are feed into iTunes and Elgato’s Turbo.264, as well as exporting directly from EyeTV. Now, all we need are the hours to watch the weeks of films and TV shows we have in iTunes to play on our AppleTV.

Which is, we think, a box of silicone chippery that has been much maligned and hope Apple extends it’s operating system before we take things into our own hands with aTVFlash. In our experience the AppleTV does exactly what we wanted: stream digital media wirelessly from our huge storage disks in one room, to our TV in another. Plus it can also download rental movies or play slideshows of our digital images.

Stuffed, Compacted and Doubled
That is the problem with compression. You have files one format and then need them in another. While our major Mac had been burning the candle both ends to convert films from avi to m4v H264, my partner found recently she needs older files uncompressed. She needed to open some QuarkXPress files circa 1993.

In those days we had a first generation CD read/writer. It took an hour to burn each disk so you made sure the blank CDs were top quality, or be prepared to face another hour of not touching your computer just in case it upset the disk burning. The majority of our CDs from this era hold files archived to save space with utilities such as Compactor and Disk Doubler, all of the files are now are useless because we cannot decompress them.

We would never have thought that nearly two decades later optical media has become disposable, use-once-then-throwaway coasters. After years of trying to scare the birds off our veggies with long lines of silver spinners, we’ve accepted they have no conceivable use other than data storage.

Nevertheless, on one she had stashed the file she needed. The file opened immediately in QuarkXPress 8, even though it was probably made version 3.2, plus all the ancillary files from Freehand and the like.

It is funny to think that in 1998 Quark offered to buy the then struggling Adobe which was laying off staff. The offer alone bucked Adobe’s share price enough to help them survive. Quark took some stick for version 5, which I always liked because it ran flawlessly in Classic under Mac OS X. But Adobe overtook with inDesign 2 and even now draws more suckers into paying the Adobe annual upgrade tax (ourselves included).

At least Quark’s upgrades are free or cost about a hundred quid if you buy early.

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