I've just upgraded to CS5 and am pretty happy so far, but I do have some questions about the interactive stuff.
I've actually been doing little interactive 'mini-sites' in Quark 8.0 fairly successfully and was looking forward to doing more of the same in InDesign as it is my preferred working environment. To give you an idea of the sort of thing I've been doing, you can have a look at this little Christian Music album promo I did for a client in Quark. https://www.musicwithintegrity……index.html
Look at that project as an example, I would say that most of it would probably be easier in InDesign, but ultimately Quark has a few things that I can't seem to figure out how to replicate. For example, Quark allows you to use 'expressions' and variables for URLs, so that I can set up a button that when clicked will pick up a URL that is fed to it from the host HTML. In the case of the linked project this was handy as the client could edit the HTML to update any links that weren't known at the time the project was created.
Am I right in thinking InDesign can only parse standard URLs and not pickup any variables from the HTML?
Also, I was very disappointed in the Audio support for the Interactive parts of InDesign, because, I'd like to build a simple audio player into many of the projects, but sound seems only to able to be treated as 'sound effects' for interface elements – ie. clicks and clunks with button pushes etc.
So, my problem is that I'm torn between Quark and InDesign for these kinds of work, as the page construction and animation is better in InDesign, but Quark offers more flexibility. I'm also torn a third way toward learning Flash, but I don't have the time or the 'Coder' mentality.
Anyway, those are my thoughts so far, feel free to chip in!
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