Charles on… anything that comes along

Just over two years ago I was sitting at Apple’s bash to show a satellite feed of the WWDC event, where Steve Jobs was going to show off ..I think it must have been Panther (10.3) when Pascal “Jimmy” Cagni, Apple’s head of Europe, got up in front of the assembled throng to say that he had a very special announcement: that The Guardian was moving to OSX and Adobe InDesign “next year”.

As is so common in the hypercompetitive world of journalism, because I was at that time at The Independent, and Neil McIntosh was blogging it directly for The Guardian, we were sitting beside each other so that we could confer on Just What These Announcements Meant, and make sure we didn’t miss anything. I turned to him and said “Eh?”

He looked up, startled. “News to me,” he mumbled, or some such.

Well, times came and times went and Apple did one revision of its OS and then another, and The Guardian was still on OS8 (yes, the venerable 8.1 - not even 8.6) and the pages were all being laid out using Quark Xpress and Quark Copydesk.

And as I write, the Technology section is still being designed on Xpress and subbed on Copydesk. But after tonight, no more.

No! From next week (well, from Wednesday, but the issue will have gone to press by then) we’ll have spanking new-ish iMac G5s running OSX and we will, truly, be doing stuff on Adobe InDesign and InCopy.

All I can say is, thank God and it’s about time. When did OS8 come out? 1997? And Xpress might have been good in its day - ditto for CopyDesk - but compared to what you can do even with InCopy, it’s old news. InCopy is a real grownup program which can do shocking things like read in a document directly from Microsoft Word rather than necessitating opening it in Word, select all, copy all, over to CopyDesk (and no Cmd-Tab - you have to go to the Menu and find the program you want with the mouse), make new document, paste. I expect to save minutes per day on that alone. Plus it has all sorts of visual systems to show how you’re progressing overall… listen, the quality of what we write might not change visibly, but our experience is going to be enormously better.

So why the delay? Well, these things never happen in a hurry (they have to be tested to destruction, or slightly further) and then there was all the debate over whether to stay broadsheet, go tabloid, or move to a different newspaper size, which meant that the whole InDesign idea got pushed onto the back burner.

But now it’s here, and ghostly white machines are appearing around the place as the new Macs spread through this floor. (The Observer is already totally InDesign/InCopy.) And it means that we can now check sites like YouTube when they’re mentioned in copy. (Well, I’ve been able to since I started, because I hook my OSX laptop up to the system - shh!). Though I’m not sure if giving people access to YouTube really counts as a positive…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Independent newspaper prepares to make a great leap sideways, from Macs to PCs (12 February 2007; score: 58.93%)
• A neat problem for Fraser (31 August 2007; score: 39.82%)
• More little birds on the Independent's move from Macs to Windows - it's XP (15 February 2007; score: 38.63%)