Re: The Death of Carbon

In article <13ju9ing4ougvee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:znu-888C1F.11214017112007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <13jr0hke4ae9o40@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hmmm. "Aggressively". Tough one.

Way back when Office did go out of its way to exploit Quartz, I seem to
recall. That and (ew) transparency effects. But lately, not so much.

This is just about the only example I can think of as well. So, all the
elaborate hypotheticals aside, it doesn't seem like this is going to
make much difference.

You have a point about MS; they have been cutting back on their investment
in OS X, and they started to do so before the *Intel* transition, never mind
this. Simply continuing to support Carbon properly would not have changed
this.

Apple should focus its efforts on exposing new OS
features though the API that's actually being used by developers who
care about new OS features.

This seems overly harsh, though. MS isn't the only ISV in the world, just
the best one. :D

There aren't many major ISVs who plan to keep using Carbon forever,
though.

You might generalize and say that cross platform apps, in general, would use
Carbon but avoid new features. I think that overstates the case also: they
would avoid unique Mac features, maybe, but that's not all new features.

Carbon is also the API of choice for OS 9 refugees, which are many. Would
you say that iTunes does not care about new OS features, say?

Sure it does, but it's a first-party app, so different considerations
apply. I doubt Apple has many objections to mixing Cocoa code into
iTunes.

[snip]

It's probably about time for Adobe to bite the bullet and rewrite
Photoshop. Take all that nice image processing code, modernize it, and
port it to a shell written using more modern technologies. Adobe already
has a modernized version of its cross-platform toolkit, which is
implemented on top of Cocoa on OS X. Lightroom uses it.

As I said to Snit, rewriting is almost always a bad choice: Photoshop, at
least, can certainly be repaired rather than junked. And repaired short of
shifting to a new cross-platform toolkit, too.

I doubt Adobe has much more interest in maintaining multiple APIs
indefinitely than Apple does.

Rewriting code might almost always be a bad choice (there's a school of
thought which says the exact opposite, but we'll leave that to one
side), but that doesn't mean it's *always* the wrong choice.

If we look at Photoshop, there are basically three parts:

1) A cross-platform toolkit that isn't implemented using the preferred
technologies on either OS X or Vista.
2) Lots of image processing code, much of which probably isn't 64-bit
clean.
3) A UI shell which is getting fairly long in the tooth.

The image processing code is going to need to be made 64-bit clean
eventually, and would benefit from being ported to a GPU-accelerated
architecture. Adobe is already talking about doing a serious UI overhaul.

This seems like an ideal case for a rewrite. It would probably be *less*
work to implement a new UI shell in Adobe's newer cross-platform
toolkit, and the image processing code is going to need so much
retooling anyway that I can't see why the end result shouldn't plug into
a new shell at least as easily (possibly more easily) as into the
current one.

--
"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing
about him is that I read three--three or four books about him last year. Isn't
that interesting?"
- George W. Bush to reporter Kai Diekmann, May 5, 2006
.

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