Think of Quark and you'll think of QuarkXPress. There's a reason for that: for years, Quark has been a one- product company. That's not for the want of trying. Quark has tried numerous times to break out of its page-layout software niche and into packaging design, interactive new media content and so on with various other products - all of which have crashed and burned, generally through being overpriced and not very good.

Remember Quark Immedia? Quark really wishes you didn't. But now the company has Quark Interactive Designer for QuarkXPress, an add-on for QuarkXPress 7 that allows designers to create interactive presentations and websites from their layouts.

The idea behind this is simple. QuarkXPress has been around for nearly two decades and has a fantastic array of tools for creating layouts that nearly every designer in the world can use. So, how about letting those designers use its capabilities to create layouts, and then provide a tool for making them interactive? Better still, why not allow them to export that interactive content as standard Flash movies, rather than, say, Immedia movies that require everyone who views the content to install a browser plug-in?

In operation, QID is simple, too. Installation requires an existing copy of QuarkXPress 7, either the standard or Passport edition, but after that, it's plain sailing. When you open XPress for the first time after installation is complete, you won't notice anything new at first. However, on closer inspection, there's a new kind of layout, 'Interactive', a new Interactive palette available, as well as several minor new menu options.

The Interactive palette is the real key to QID, since it contains almost all the tools this app has to offer. All you have to do is select an object in an Interactive layout, give it a name in the palette, then choose what 'action' to make it do (and when to make it do it) using one of the pull-down menus or one of the other various tabs in the palette.