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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Software News => Topic started by: Skippy on June 30, 2002, 09:23:53 PM
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This is the first new product release for PageStream in almost three years!
PageStream is a proven desktop publishing program. It is suitable for all Publishing tasks like simple newspaper over coloured advertisements up to the technical book.
With PageStream one can produce letters, coloured homework, presentations, visiting cards and much more besides.
Amiga requires at least a 68000 processor with AmigaOS 2.04 or later. It also requires at least 8MB of hard drive space and 6mb ram.
Website: DTP World (http://www.grasshopperllc.com/" target="new)
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Great to see that one of the few AmigaOS apps that stands an actual chance to compete with other professional software on other platforms is still alive!
We've got the DTP bit covered, now we need modern tools to do the other basic things people expect to do with a computer: Word Processors and Spreadsheets with MS Office fileformat compatibility, Web browsers supporting modern standards, a Media viewer in the OS supporting DVD/DivX/ASF/QT and whatnot - and Games!
The battle stands on the software and fileformat field.
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Great to see that one of the few AmigaOS apps that stands an actual chance to compete with other professional software on other platforms is still alive!
It is able to compete with DTP programs that are really old... look at the comparison at the homepage:
XPress 3.3 ---- The current version is 5.0
PageMaker 6.5 ---- The current version is 7.0
ReadySetGo! 7 ---- that program is from 1996
But it still is great that it's being developed.
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Not exactly new news though is this? Pagestream 4.1.3 was released 5 month ago!
Dave
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You are much too harsh on Pagestream. True tyhe other main players have added much to their products but the basics remain the same. Moreover Pagestream has a complete Arexx interface and that means a lot more practical extensions can be added then even Xpress can muster.
Sometimes more is not necessarily better, a lot of the bells and whistles are just that, generalisied production features not necessarily very useful and more easily and productively done in scripts.
Also I would rather a DTP software which does not try to be a half-arsed photo-shop, a half-arsed production manager and a half-arsed illustrator - this is where most of the bells and whistles are in the mainline professional programs and we can well do without them and their clutter.
Pagestream is a more then respectable DTP program and when SHEEP comes out it may well overshoot the competition in practical DTP, anyhow Arexx already gives it a substantial edge at least as potential (it really needed to come back onto the Amiga to make this exploitatable).
Hopefully we will see an AmigaDE version with a native SHEEP interface in the future which will make it a head to head competitor with the big-boys of DTP.
The fact is that printing technology defines effective DTP and not the other way round. I have always liked Xpress which by far is the most professional system, but the potential of Pagestream and Arexx leave it for dead if you are after real rather than apparent productivity.