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Photoshop for OS X
MolGOLD writes: "Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop, which will feature native OS X support. Now that Photoshop 7 will run natively under OS X, will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"
MacCentral is running a much more in-depth article, complete with screenshots you can actually see. Also included are a hands-on review and some intelligent commentary missing from the very PC-centric C|Net.
My other computer is your Windows box
will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"
I bet you'll see a press release from Macromedia soon, but that'll be it for a while. They're behind schedule releasing Dreamweaver 5 and Ultradev 5, which is rumored to support dot-Net, and they've gotten to the point where they're just putting out open-ended Microsoft-style vaporware press releases instead.
Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX, but of course, that's just my betting. Then again, maybe this is the reason DW/UD5 is so behind schedule - maybe they're trying to release everything at once, including native OSX support and dot-Net authoring. I'm getting to the point where I wouldn't accept anything less when this thing finally comes out.
What's your damage, Heather?
Adobe's market is HUGE in the apple section, the Wintel market for their products pales in comparison. Practically every publishing shop in the world runs on Apple hardware using Adobe and Quark apps. So yes they're in a hurry. It's their biggest market.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Looks like the threading model and the new disk drivers have made a huge difference.. And of course better memory management
Here's a snippet from another BB.
having played with PS betas, I'm pretty confident in saying that Adobe Photoshop 7 for OSX is a Carbon application.
All this means is that its linked to the Carbonlib (think share library)
rather than the Cocoa frameworks.
They're both native, its just that Cocoa apps get more features for free from the OS, which means they implement more of the standard OSX features.
Carbon apps can implement just as many of those features... but tend not to because it takes a lot of work to implement them (for instance, BBEdit supports the Services menu)
Photoshop will probably implement a lot of the Cocoa features even though its a Carbon app, simply because Adobe has the resources to do this (Just like Microsoft)
Another serious difference is that Cocoa can only currently be targetted via Objective C (ObjC++ too), Java and AppleScript (this is another major reason to use Carbon for Photoshop.
And thats about it.
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Pantone is one of the things Gimp will NEVER have. Pantone is a patented technology and requires the Gimp community to pay them $$$ if they want to implement it.
1. Live CMYK editing (essential for real-world print publishing)
2. Font handling well beyond anything available within XFree86
3. Tight integration with tools like Illustrator (e.g. being able to specify vector masks using Illustrator's sophisticated Bezier tools and use them directly in Photoshop) and inDesign.
4. Peerless Postscript/PDF integration (i.e. produce Postscript that will actually rip on a professional imagesetter and produce usable output on the first try, instead of wasting hundreds/thousands of bucks on trial and error while your client stands around angrily looking at their watch)
5. Best of breed built-in algorithms for things like scaling, color correction, etc.
6. Polish.
I've used the Gimp, and I'm impressed by what it can do, but in a past life I also worked in a graphic arts shop, and I cannot stress enough the importance of some of the above items (particularly 1 and 4) in real-world paying applications.
If all you're doing is touching up vacation snaps, then Photoshop's big pricetag probably isn't worth it to you, but if you're trying to make a living pushing pixels, no other app comes close, and the Gimp (as cool as it is) isn't even in the ballpark.
Anyway... I'll probably end up with Photoshop (I've been using it since Version 2.5). But there are options for OS X. (And I'm sorry, but GIMP is not an option for professional photo editing... It's a step above most graphics software, but it's not Photoshop or TIFFany. (I actually think people who use and like GIMP on OS X should really download TIFFany3 Trial, I think they'll be pleasantly supprised).
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Well, basic CMYK support would be useful. A history palette, non-destructive layer effects, vector text and layers, basic knockout features. Well, hell, there's a lot that Photoshop can do that the GIMP can't. Plus, PS has a very well thought out and useful interface.
The GIMP is a pretty decent application and you can't beat the price, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a standard part of a professional graphic artist's tool box.
Pooty tweet
This is just my guess as a long time Mac developer. It is likely that Photoshop contained lots of 68k assembly code that had to be rewritten for PPC. Photoshop was written back when you had to squeeze every bit of processing power out of the Mac. While this could work on Mac OS 9 and earlier (Mac OS 9 has a great 68k emulator), this needed to be changed for OS X.
You are wrong about the APIs. The vast majority of APIs still exist in Carbon. It is true there are preferred APIs (e.g Event Handling) that are new. The old APIs are at least 80% intact and native to OS X. This is the whole purpose to Carbon.
Adopting the new event model and porting 68k assembly code would have taken some time in an application as complex as Photoshop.
Apple is absolutely a software company. iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, AppleWorks...
Apple's a 60/40 hardware-software company, I'd say.
In terms of money its more like 91/9 hardware-software (At least for this last quarter - $114 Million software revenue; $1.261 Billion hardware revenue) In terms of effort you may be right but that 40% effot in software is done to drive that 90% in hardware revenue.
Most of the software is given away for free with a hardware purchase. Even the software they sell is part of a strategy to sell hardware. Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, etc are intended to be "Killer Apps" that drive hardware sales in a particular niche market. The 9% of revenues is just a nice bonus. The only software that doesn't fit this bill (though it used to) is Filemaker, which for that reason is not part of Apple but was spun off as a subsidiary.