Quark shows off QuarkXPress 7

Quark has given a first preview of QuarkXPress 7, describing it as the most significant upgrade in the history of the DTP application and promising that it will ship this year. Speaking at the TypoTechnica 2005 conference in London, Scott Wieseler, product analyst in Quark's product marketing group and Gavin Drake, UK director of marketing, said that the new version is the biggest rewrite the company has ever done, first in order to incorporate support for Unicode and OpenType and secondly to make it easier to add new features in the future versions. Support for OpenType will help to re-establish the application as a pre-eminent typographical environment and may see the end of Passport, the version of the software which provides multiple language capabilities. ...more

UK games chart: Star Wars: Battlefront 2 storms top spot

It takes Star Wars to break football's stranglehold on the ELSPA UK games chart. Lucas Arts' multi-format game Star Wars: Battlefront 2 takes the top spot in its second week in the charts. Another game in Rockstar's GTA series, Liberty City Stories, goes straight in at number two. ...more

ECTS 2001: ECTS awards, er, awarded

Rage's Denki Blocks is the unlikely game of the show, with the ECTS Stars heading in some surprising destinations. This year's European Consumer Trade Show, held at ExCeL, London, was a disappointingly underwhelming affair, thanks largely to many of the major players withdrawing from this year's event. Nevertheless, for other developers and publishers ECTS is a vital date in their calendar, with the event being used to showcase up-and-coming product. ...more

Broadband still too expensive

Price cuts over better content - that's the key to broadband ubiquity. With an overwhelming 94 per cent, voters on our recent poll plumped for price cuts as the factor that would make them sign up for ADSL en masse. The poll asked whether better content or cheaper prices were the key contributing elements to signing up to broadband. ...more

Windows Live Mail Desktop beta goes public

As promised earlier this year, Microsoft has made a public beta available of the new look Windows Live Mail Desktop (WMLD). This is earmarked to replace the Outlook Express mail client currently bundled with Windows XP. Microsoft has enabled direct sign-up for US and UK customers with Free Hotmail accounts. ...more