Re: Yet Another Reason to Love Adobe

In article <fmoore-464678.13533003042008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Fred Moore <fmoore@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <tph-5E3E04.11214803042008@localhost>,
Tom Harrington <tph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <fmoore-5F6602.11553103042008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Fred Moore <fmoore@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Next Photoshop will get 64-bit boost--on Windows only

<http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9909725-39.html>

It's more than just a business decision. Photoshop has been around so
long on Macs that updating to 64 bits requires some major reworking of
the app's core. A good writeup on this is
<http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/64000_question>.

Thanks for the post, Tom. I read the article and it does seem that Apple
is partly to blame. That said, perhaps you can clarify: Once Apple
announced Cocoa (how many years ago?), wasn't it generally assumed that
that move put Carbon irrevocably on the road to deprecation, despite
Carbon being a 'lower level environment' than Cocoa? So _shouldn't_
Adobe have started rewriting its 10^6 lines of code then?

That was the idea when Mac OS X and Cocoa were announced. However it
soon became clear that if they did this, with the small Apple market
share of the time, companies like Adobe and Microsoft would just drop
Mac development altogether. It was much too much work to justify based
on likely sales of Mac versions. Other companies not quite so big as
those two would likely have made the same decision.

Apple needed their apps more than they needed Apple, because they faced
the real possibility that Mac OS X would come out and have no apps of
interest to anyone. So Carbon's demise was played down and delayed, and
Apple stopped mentioning it completely. Apple even added new features
to Carbon over the years. As Gruber's article noted, it wasn't until
WWDC 2007 (last June) that Apple made it clear Carbon was being eased
out. Until that time my own take on the situation was that Carbon would
probably stick around forever, because there was no public indication
that they ever intended to drop it.

The current situation was probably the best result that could be
reasonably hoped for. Adobe wouldn't have considered the transition
without Apple making it necessary, so a delayed release had to happen at
some point. Fortunately by now Apple's selling well enough that Adobe
will almost certainly follow through instead of abandoning the idea.

--
Tom "Tom" Harrington
Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002
http://www.atomicbird.com/
.

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