Last week, it was pointed out to me that I started off sounding nicely silly, then I turned a bit serious and possibly a little uplifting. I promised to stop that this instant.

But while I know this is just you and me talking, still I do think about you during the week, I do think about what we can natter about, and yet I don’t think I have much control over the way I say it.

I must do: if I were writing you a news story you would know. Yet it seems to me that unless there is a specific requirement for a certain tone in my writing, my writing is just the way it is and I can’t do anything about it.

Which I would have been fine about until around seventeen minutes ago when I installed QuarkXPress on my Mac. Quark is the publishing app that conceivably you use, but more likely you only vaguely remember, and even more likely you’ve never heard of. It’s not my first choice for a publishing app, I’ve only installed it now because I need it for a job, I wouldn’t think to mention it to you.

Except.

This app has a tone and I am fascinated.

I don’t think about apps, I think about what I can do with them, and this one has been written over decades by countless developers — yet it has a single clear and actually rather strident tone.

It is proof positive, I think, that the writer’s voice comes out through whatever medium they are working on, and whether or not they’re working alone.

Or maybe it just does when the tone is arrogant.

Yet Quark shouldn’t be arrogant, it should seem like a scrappy underdog, trying to get back to its glory days of the 1980s. The business shot itself in the foot back then and the best you could say is that it aimed well.

Doubtlessly there is a Business 101 class somewhere about how Quark ruled the publishing world and then surrendered it all to Adobe InDesign. I’d take that class.

But today, all I want to do is install the app so I can do a job. And instead installing QuarkXPress was a job itself. Where usually you find an app, click the Buy button and then start working in it, Quark steps you through a 1980s corporate-style installation sequence that says you — oi, you, I’m looking at you – are binding this app to this machine and you’d better not forget it.

If you try to forget it, if you try to do some work in another app while Quark gathers its bits together, tough shit. Quark is a good Mac citizen in that it will allow you to switch to another app — but it’s s crap Mac citizen because it then covers up that other app so that you can’t use it.

Consequently, I read a book while ignoring various warnings, and then I got to wondering. There must be a reason why I actively removed this app some years ago instead of simply leaving it there in case I needed it again.

And just as I thought about that, QuarkXPress was fully installed — and I found out why I had removed it.

Remember, this was a copy of the app I had just now, just right now, downloaded fresh from the official site. But the moment it had finished installing, it immediately told me there was an update I had to download. From the official site.

And then, I promise you this is true, once that updated had installed, Quark told me there was an update I had to install.

I suspect what happened is that the first one was an update to the installer, and the second was an update to the app.

But.

This is QuarkXPress 2019. There have been several releases of it since and there is just no chance that it is getting serious updates the instant I download it or — oh, come on — again now as I talk about it. Seriously. Right now. Fantastic.

QuarkXPress updates when the wind changes direction and maybe you can praise the writer/developers for constantly improving their app. But you won’t. Because all work stops while it updates, I’ve had to wait now while it knocks on the glass of my screen demanding attention over and over again.

I am agog at how strongly you can feel the attitudes and the personalities of the writers of something that is not a story, not a drama, and instead just a tool.

But as I say, I installed this for a job. And now that job has turned in to figuring out how to get the client to ditch QuarkXPress.

Bugger. Now my tone is clearly sarcastic, possibly a little petty, definitely annoyed. So there it is, there is no way to write anything without a tone coming through. I just don’t think that the makers of Quark are any better at controlling their tone than I am mine.