Having used Quark and hated the company for over 20 years, I have been looking for YEARS for a good replacement for the few simple projects that I now do each year.

I tried Swift Publisher (lousy interface), MultiAd Creator Desktop (quite good, but the idiotic company discontinued it), and Scribus (sucks, but should be great).

iStudio Publisher is FINALLY it. It has a few quirky ways of doing things, but it is clean, intelligent, and stable. And, the price is great.

I can't speak to any of the other reviewers, but for me, iStudio Publisher is a godsend. When I switched from PC to Mac a year ago, my only regret was that I couldn't take Microsoft Publisher with me. I have discovered that not only can I do the things that made M. Pub. special to me, but many others. Of note, and something I consider essential, watch the video tutorials. They are excellent, numerous, and contain info you absolutely need to get the most out of the software.

I have never used a desktop publishing program before but I found this program to be very easy to use and understand. I have created several documents and saved them as PDF files, then opened them in Preview and did a "Save As" to save them in different image file formats. It would be nice to save the documents to images in iStudio Publisher, but it's no big show stopper. I am coming from Appleworks and needed to find a simple drawing/layout app. for 10.7 Lion. This is easy to learn and has a bunch of how to videos on the publishers web site, I think it's great.

Now that I have figured out how to use this application I've grown to like it very much. It is designed to fill the void between Pages and InDesign. iStudio does have somefeatures the biggies do not have.

Granted, right now it is missing some features but looking at the developer's roadmap on his/her website many new features will be added in upcoming updates.

I bought on a special promotion and am very glad I did.

I am always keen to see a new challenger in the DTP stakes, particularly one using Cocoa and I give full marks to the developer for having given this a go.

However I can not see it as being anything other than a beta. It is usable as it is and will take considerably more work.

From common things such as drag and drop doesn't work, to oddities in graphics where images are oddly cropped within objects. Selecting from the type list is slow and odd. The drawing tools don't behave like any I've ever used before and I have used a lot.

Cosmetics issues hit you in the eye, such as the tool icons being clumsily large, shapes that don't distort intelligently, and are just so-so built in clipart. Why implement stars as separate objects according to how many points they have? Why are we required to nominate an image type before importing? Why are there no preferences? Why use a slider in the Inspector palette just because it is laid out poorly and nothing fits?

I AM impressed by so much functionality included at this point of its development, just not how it has been included, nor to claiming it is final release. I repeat this is a beta in all but name.

I would be much more enthusiastic if it was a fully Cocoa app with all its standard UI, icons and simplified conventions. Beat Pages at its own game, which is not hard as there is a lot missing and not right still in Pages.

I am sitting back and seeing if this becomes another Pixelmator, which has had a great deal more aesthetic thought put into it. As it stands it is a diamond in the rough.