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Adobe Universal Binaries... in 2007
bo peterberg writes "According to a pdf on Adobe's website, they remain committed to supporting Intel-based Macs. However, Intel-based Macs will not be supported until the next upgrade of all creative products. The current version will not be re-released."
This is kind of a deal breaker for me, as I make my living using Photoshop to a VERY large degree. Using it with Rosetta may be "passable"...it's just not going to cut it in the long run. I was hoping that Adobe would have an upgrade for existing customers, but I guess not.
Though they may change their minds, who knows. So much for upgrading this year. I suppose this will work out better in the end, as the Intel Macs will get a chance to mature a little more.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
How many companies are going to use the Intel transition to force paid upgrades? I can see some companies offering a 'special deal', pay $X for the universal binary edition, so it'll actually run on your new computer. Sort of a variation on the DVD re-release double-dip, except with a gun to the (figurative) head. (and no, I know they don't force you to buy their software, but if you're a graphics artist in a Mac only shop, your IT department will have to buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac, whenever your machine gets upgraded).
Looks like windfall time for Mac software vendors.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
The first IntelMacs use 32 bit CPUs, but Intel will release 64 bit version of the CPU later this year. Will these first IntelMacs be obsoleted? OS X for the Intel CPUs will obviously go to 64 bit --- need it for the PowerMacs as their power users won't want to lower memory capacity. Maybe Adobe and other third party software vendors see this situation and prefer to just wait and do only 64 bit Intel native binaries?
Good point.
Personally, I'd love to see anyone, whether it's Apple or somebody else, bring out an image editing program that uses CoreImage to its full potential.
Photoshop is a relic, running in Adobe's home-grown Mac OS 7 compatibility environment. They can't even handle a floating-point frame buffer yet.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Exactly. The real reason they aren't switching over CS 2 is because they can't. They've been using CodeWarrior forever and they would probably still be putting off moving away from it if it wasn't for the fact that they have to in order to support Universal Binaries. It'll take them to 2007 just getting it to build correctly.
I work on plugins for Adobe's applications occasionally, and let me say that the [apparent] "maybe in 2007" statement from Adobe is not a big surprise to me. The applications in their creative suite and plugin software development kits rely on CodeWarrior, which is [effectively] a dead product. AFAIK, it could never support development of universal binaries, and I would speculate that they have known this for a while.
Adobe's plugin Software Development Kits (SDKs) are based on C++ object models, which will mean that plugins and their host applications will need to be built with the same tools for everything to work. To move on, I think Adobe is going to have to move all their products and SDKs to XCode (gcc), and though I do not work for Adobe, I would wager that it will be a fairly tough job. IMO, Q2 or Q3 2007 seems a fairly realistic goal.
The problems the Intel transition will pose for both Adobe and the third-party plugin developers will be daunting. Quark and its associates have similar troubles, but I have personally seen some decent progress on the Quark side, though I think NDA prevents me from saying anything specific. Though I have seen little progress from Adobe as yet, I am confident they will deliver.
Adobe has a lot of work ahead of them, so I would encourage users of Adobe's creative apps to be patient, and realize how much work Adobe has ahead of them and that it involves more than just moving the applications to Intel. SDKs often offer as many if not more challenges than their host applications. I will part with a criticism: Everybody has known that CodeWarrior is dead for a long time. I think Adobe should have started putting more resources into jumping ship right when the writing went on the wall. Now we are all going to have to wait a while because Adobe was so shiftless about getting off the dead branch.
Even if that weren't the case, Adobe has no real financial incentive to do a rewrite of the current apps. From Adobe's point of view, it's much better to develop the next version and then satisfying all that pent up demand. For those that need to run PS (or whatever) NOW, Apple is still selling perfectly capable and speedy G5s (including a quad G5).
I bought a G4 powerbook late last year, knowing there would be Intel powerbooks sometime this year. I don't mind waiting a rev. or two or even three, at which point I can buy a factory refurbed rev. 2 and not worry if the software has been ported.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
No kidding. Its only now that Adobe is even getting their shit together enough to port their codebases to Xcode. If they had done this earlier, they would not have so much work ahead of them. (To be fair, these are incredibly complicated apps we are talking about.)
And a true Core Image supported editing app would certainly be tasty. Apple takes pretty much all the glory for realtime manipulations like that so far... in fact I think a lot of the eye candy in OS X ('3D cube' user switching, 3D RSS screensaver, Ken Burns effect, etc) are there to egg devs on a bit, show them what the API can do. iPhoto's realtime adjustment palette in iLife 06 is very slick. And its sort of weird that Photoshop can't do some things like that.
I don't know that much about the GIMP but I wonder if they would ever be able to take advantage of something like CI. There is portability to maintain...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
That's not quite what happened...
Premiere was not discontinued for Mac until well after Final Cut's launch. Apple basically stole the entire market from them. When sales fell through the floor, Adobe discontinued the Mac version of Premiere, and also announced that basically all of their software should be run on PCs for best results, a historical first. This was essentially the beginnings of the major Apple/Adobe rivalry. (They were really pissed about iPhoto as well.)
It doesn't get mentioned a lot around here, but Premiere was hardly the only Apple casualty in that space; they have virtually eaten the nonlinear editing space in a very short span of time. Remember Avid? They are still around but not nearly the force they once were, a name pretty much synonymous with high end / cinema nonlinear editing. Media 100 also. Final Cut is a juggernaut, a totally killer app. And Apple has Final Cut Express to compete with as well. And then they picked up Shake and RAYZ and a few others to eat a piece of what SGI used to totally dominate.
The really funny part is, Final Cut started its life (as I know the story) at Adobe, as a radical new verison of Premiere after v4. Premiere 4 was super popular, but people who know it and used it will all tell you that v5 sucked big time. The reason for this is, the Premiere team had this great new interface but Adobe didn't want to deviate so radically from the old Premiere look and feel. In frustration a large number of them quit and went over to Macromedia, who started developing their own editing app called Final Cut. It evolved for a bit there, but Macromedia got cold feet and had a sort of had a truce with Adobe at the time, so they sold the unreleased codebase... to Apple.
(This is hearsay I received from a high mucketymuck at Adobe who was bombed on Bailey's at the time, so take as you will.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
If your app is 100% cocoa, then producing an Intel binary is as simple as a recompile.
Almost. I had a few developers who needed to tweak a few things to build for Intel, but most of them were done the first day of WWDC '05.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's why I'd shell out full-bloat-rip-me-off-and-sodomize-me just-as-adobe-does-prices for a full-blown Cocoa and Mac only Photoshop killer app. I REALLY WOULD!
It's such a shame that the TIFFany3 developers never did anything with that application. The GUI was fubar, with some work on that app it could have left Photoshop dead in the water, but then again, it's them we have to thank for QuartzExtreme and CoreImage, so maybe it was a good thing after all that they got bought out by Apple.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
well the fact that Adobe apps are not cocoa is significant then... XPress is already compiled with xCode; universal binary public will be posted in couple of weeks... light years ahead of Adobe product...