By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 03:00 PM EST

QuarkXpress 7 due this month

While Quark is gathering the European press for a QuarkXPress 7 launch event at the Congress Centre in London on June 2, it actually plans to first debut the major desktop publishing software upgrade in the United States this month.

The Denver, Colorado company will host an invitation-only special event at The Puck Building in New York City on May 23 to formally unveil QuarkXPress 7, which has been in public beta for several months.

Quark promises the event to include "special sessions, special speakers, and special surprises." It will kick-off with a keynote by Jürgen Kurz, the company's senior vice president of product management.

QuarkXPress 7 will be a Universal Binary application capable of running natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. It will include a slew of new features such as new transparency tools, picture effects enhancements, SD import enhancements, composite zones and content sharing tools.

Fadell, Johnson exercise options

Members of Apple's executive team continued this month to cash in on the company's success.

Between May 1st and May 3rd, newly appointed iPod chief Tony Fadell exercised 45,437 stock options -- including 3500 owned by his wife -- to cash in on a cool $3.2M.

According to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fadell paid between $10.19 and $10.89 for the options, which he sold at market values between $71.11 and $71.38.

A day later, Apple's retail boss Ron Johnson exercised a total of 150,000 company stock options, reaping over $10.7M. Johnson paid $23.78 for the options, which he disposed of at market values between $72.00 and $72.28.

Following the sales, Fadell and Johnson retained 577 and 149,890 shares of Apple common stock, respectively.

Apple closes down OS X for Intel

In fear of software pirates, Apple has closed down the Intel version of Mac OS X, according to a report.

"Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code," Tom Yager wrote for InfoWorld. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."

While Yager notes that Apple has only shipped client systems where users care little about openness, he notes the company soon "will break out Intel variants of the kinds of machines [...] namely, servers and workstations."