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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?"
I use computers for one thing only: content creation. This includes Photoshop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Fireworks... essentially, media creation and manipulation. I've tried every toy I can get my hands on, and have come to the conclusion that what works best for me is the Adobe and Macromedia suites on a Macintosh.
UNIX/Linux/BSD is neato, but I failed math, suck at logic, and can't grep to save my life. I'd like to play around with it and learn it, but I have no real reason to- and my experience with Free Software has been pretty nasty- I bitch about nonexistant intallers, suck-ass window managers, poor hardware support, and I'm told "FIX IT YOURSELF!"... and as a non programmer, I'd rather stick with something that already works for me to begin with.
Apple has brought UNIX to the desktop. Now I can run all of my happy fun day to day tasks and learn the bash (well, ZSH), discover the joys of suing to root and doing a kill 0 to see what happens, and generally have the best of both worlds. I see this as being rather relevant, really- if the company known for making "idiot friendly" machines can make UNIX useable for an idiot (or those of us that know a few lines of HTML, Lingo and BASIC)...and the companies that support that company port their apps.... then what the hell is keeping the rest of the world from following suit? Hmm?
Hell. With OS X, I can run Apache, X-11 apps, Gimp, Photoshop, Maya, Combustion, Quake.... dear gods, it can do absolutely EVERYTHING I NEED. I only need to run ONE OS for all of my art geek and computer geek needs. Hot damn. THAT is relevant.
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?
PC users don't upgrade their OS's every time one particular app gets upgraded (although it helps).
To be fair, you're comparing apples and oranges. The last time the PC world saw such a tremendous shift in the capabilities of the base operating system was August 1995, when Windows 95 was released. After that, it's been incremenetal upgrades to the OS.
In late 1995, quite a lot of people were upgrading their applications (at least, the ones from MS) in order to take advantage of what Windows 95 offered. In this case, the particulars may be different, but the essence is the same: a lot of people want to upgrade their software to take advantage of what Mac OS X brings them.
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.
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
I'm constantly told that Macs are best for contention creation
Meaning that mentioning Macs is the best way to start a flame war?
Typo, or clever pun? You be the judge.
--saint
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.
Actually, artists who are heavily using Photoshop buy machines frequently to take advantage of better hardware speeds. It's just that they've been taking their machines and telling them to boot into OS 9 instead of OS X.
This holds back adoption of OS X because there's no compelling reason to invest in cocoa for such a small base and even carbon can be put off until you start getting requests for it. Well, now all those artists are going to start swapping over and that's going to make it easier to shift the programmers as well.
Upping the OS X adoption rate and moving forward with their competitive strategy is important for Apple because it provides unique abilities that you don't get on Windows boxen (like system wide spell checking for all Cocoa apps). It's going to be nice to be able to have functionality bought once and spread throughout your application irregardless of vendor. Apple wants us to get to that nice world fast because *that's* going to get a lot more boxes sold.
Remember, Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. They like OS X primarily because it's a driver of their hardware sales, and only secondarily because of the money they get directly from it.
They need to sell more boxes because if they get to a magic point, one very clear advantage will appear, PPC chips are smaller and cheaper to produce at like volumes. At that point, Macs will not only become the easier to use alternative, they will become the cheaper alternative as well.
Apple is absolutely a software company. iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, AppleWorks.
All *very* important to Apple's strategy. Without Apple's groundbreaking software, the hardware sales would be hurt quite a bit.
My neighbors bought iMacs for the house. They don't care about Photoshop. What sold them was the idea of iMovie and iTunes. That's what sells a ton of people.
Apple's a 60/40 hardware-software company, I'd say.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
But they have GIMP, what more could they need? ;-)
Follow me
I use Corel PhotoPaint almost every day; I couldn't do without it. The interface is far better than PhotoShop so every task is easier to accomplish, it runs at least 3x as fast (I am *not* exaggerating) on the same hardware, and it does most things as well and some things better (JPG compression is 2-3x better for the same quality image). Only time I ever need to drag out PhotoShop is for colour masking.
Tried The GIMP but wasn't impressed -- struck me as too much like an update of PaintBrush. Oh well.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The "little chips of freedom" you're so afraid of giving up are the ability to steal. People these days are so busy proving Hobbes right about his opinion of human nature that they don't stop to consider why his "social contract" is necessary in the first place.
As someone whose livelihood depends on his writing, I can tell you that a secure way of distributing electronic media is vital to publishers and authors, both big and small, before they consider the internet anything more than a playground. Password-protected documents are, to me, a much better choice for content distribution than the alternatives, where it can only be used with one e-book reader and/or system.
You do not have a right to access content that you do not own. Ownership implies that you were given the password to access the data.
You don't present any valid reason that it is a bad thing other than your reactionary comment about the DMCA. Care to give some reasons that password-protected files are a bad thing?
Shinma
Every time I use the GIMP, I run into an odd quirk that invariable becomes a giant pain in the ass. The handling of layers is one such thing. As is selection handling. One of my big pet peeves is when things work and look closely like others, but don't do so consistently. If a UI or functionality looks or works a little like something already established, it better works a lot like it. Or it will be frustrating, make me angry, and will cause me to reject the whole thing (no matter how worthy it is.)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Before I started taking all of the CS classes I'm in now, I couldn't understand why Adobe was so slow in getting out a native OS X version of Photoshop. However, I've come to these conclusions:
1. Carbonizing seemed easy, at first. When they demoed their "Carbonized" version of PS back in the day, there was really nothing to it. All they had to do was modify the non-complying API calls. However, since OS X's paradigm shifted so much, they also had to remake a lot of the interface to conform and work with Aqua. That is a very difficult proposition when you have a program with a code base such as PS.
2. Their apps also seem to have a lot of legacy 68k-centric code. While I'm certainly not an expert in OS X programming, I'm sure that it doesn't help to have 68k-based instructions when you're trying to have your program run on a modern PPC-based operating system with a new set of APIs. It just doesn't make things easy.
3. Trying to develop Carbonized apps is a difficult proposition because the API isn't set in stone. When the "Carbonization is easy" thing was first floated, most folks probably didn't think it was going to be still under development. A lot of people have likened it to a moving target. I would agree from my point of view, because if you don't know what is going to change from one CarbonLib revision to another, life becomes a bitch
There are probably many inaccuracies in this posting, but from my point of view, Adobe isn't completely to blame. Right now, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed and hope it was worth the wait.
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.
Why is it such a big news that Adobe finally decided to write a native version of Photoshop for OSX, but noone ever mentioned that Corel's Draw and PhotoPaint have been available for OSX quite some time now.
Because the professional graphics market that is key to Apple's success makes their living using Photoshop and was not even aware that Corel made a 'competing' product.