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XPress is the last major Mac application that has not yet appeared in an OS X version, but it had widely been expected to be ready by the beginning of next year.
Quark's failure to move to OS X is causing a major headache for Apple, because print and publishing is among the few markets where the Mac is still dominant. The sluggish sales of high-value Power Macs are partly accounted for by the lack of movement

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in the publishing industry.

And Apple's announcement that, from January 2003, all new Macs will boot only into OS X means that there will be a period of around six months when buyers of new Macs will not have a version of XPress able to run natively on their new machines.

'Would we like to have [Quark 6] out already? Sure, but we would have to sacrifice quality to do so,' said Glen Turpin, Quark's communications manager.

James Therrien, Quark's manager of professional services, revealed that XPress 6.0 is being completely rewritten as an OS X-only application, rather than recoded as a Carbon app.

'You can see why Quark is taking its time,' said a spokesman for XChange, a distributor of Xtensions. Most customers we deal with are still using XPress 4.0. And - apart from the heavy upgrade costs of moving to OS X, which is not exactly popular in the current climate - publishers will think twice if their favourite Xtensions aren't available for OS X,' he added.