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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."
So much for LightTable destroying Aperture!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
... Quark Inc. has announced the will create a universal binary of their flagship product QuarkXpress sometime before in 2070.
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 $X for the universal binary edition, so it'll actually run on your new computer. Sort of a variation on the DVD re-release double-dip, except with a gun to the (figurative) head. (and no, I know they don't force you to buy their software, but if you're a graphics artist in a Mac only shop, your IT department will have to buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac, whenever your machine gets upgraded).
Looks like windfall time for Mac software vendors.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
The first IntelMacs use 32 bit CPUs, but Intel will release 64 bit version of the CPU later this year. Will these first IntelMacs be obsoleted? OS X for the Intel CPUs will obviously go to 64 bit --- need it for the PowerMacs as their power users won't want to lower memory capacity. Maybe Adobe and other third party software vendors see this situation and prefer to just wait and do only 64 bit Intel native binaries?
There are no real surprises here. This is very similar to how they transitioned Photoshop and Illustrator to Mac OS X several years ago. My main hopes are that CS3 is not living half in two worlds like they did with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7.
On the bright side, if Adobe keeps up the status quo on Creative Suite 3 then we will see all of the Apps that ship in Creative Suite, ship together. Acrobat 5 was horrible on Mac OS X, the Acrobat application ran natively in OS X, but the distiller ran in Classic and suffered severe performance penalties as a result. Hopefully all of the apps tranistioning around the same time will leave a better taste in their customers mouths.
I am glad to see them attempting to show off their xCode developemtn prowess by delivering the LightRoom beta earlier than their other software packages.
Except that you can deactivate your previously installed copy and install it on a new Mac.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Mozilla/Firefox: TargetAlert.
CSS3 compliant browser: a[href$=".pdf"]:after {content: "[PDF]"; font-size:smaller} in your user style sheet. Modify as needed for other types of "annoying" links.
Constitutionally Correct
Quit whining and install one of the plugins that labels non-HTML links for you.
Or uninstall the Acrobat plug-in from your browser, so the browser will ask you whether you want to open the PDF, download it, or cancel.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Adobe isn't updating until 2007, we can probably assume the same for the Macromedia apps. Native Instruments (Reaktor, Absynth, Kontakt) is going to be rolling out products starting at the end of Q2 2006 to Q1 2007. Cycling '74 (Max/MSP, pluggo, Jitter) is estimating "the end of 2006" but they haven't even come close to meeting a deadline in many years, so that'll probably be mid-2007. Steinberg (Cubase) has said they'll update "sometime" in 2006.
So... exactly who is the market for the new Intel products? The swarms of iPod owners that own Apple products for reasons of fashion more than functionality? It seems like none of the apps that high-end Apple users actually use aren't going to be out for quite some time.
But they sorta had to release the Intel products so soon, though didn't they? All the hardcore Apple guys I knew said they wouldn't be buying any new stuff until the transition to Intel. Oh well...
sig.
So they're covering up their move to Java? :)
Did the beginning of the article:
"According to a pdf on Adobe's website..."
not give it away? I thought it was quite obvious. But I guess complaining is easier than reading.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Honestly it almost seems Adobe does this to screw with Apple
Oh, I don't think they're malicious, just complacent. They're the Microsoft of image editing, and they'll behave as such until and unless there's a major competitor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So... exactly who is the market for the new Intel products? ...It seems like none of the apps that high-end Apple users actually use aren't going to be out for quite some time.
You mean somebody still believes the hype that Apple users are mostly graphic artists these days? I know a lot of people including a few who are artists that use macs. Most mac users I know, however, are programmers and scientists. Another large number are non-power users who basically use the Web, e-mail, and some word processing. More people I know are concerned about Mathematica or their personal favorite terminal application running nicely than photoshop. I'm sure there are a lot of graphics people who are pissed about the delay, but I doubt they are a significant number to affect the sales results. I've seen this exact same thing happen several times on the Mac platform and developers never learn. A major niche application developer announces they won't be supporting new hardware for a year or more. Two years later they actually get a version out the door and find half their customers have moved on to a more nimble competitor's application and they just aren't all that interested in switching back. Adobe just announced, "hey anyone who can throw together something nice that actually uses all the built in CoreImage technology that already does half what our product does is free to muscle in and steal our customers." Brilliant!
- Apple has ALWAYS made it clear their move to Intel would be in stages.
- Apple has ALWAYS said it would be done from their lower-end products to their upper-end.
- The iMac is Apple's entry-level product.
- Therefore the iMac being iNtelicized first is in line with Apple's announced plans.
- With the iMac being Apple's entry-level consumer product it doesn't have a large professional user base.
- Therefore professionals, who have large investments in hardware and software, are unlikely to be affected by the Intel transition until it reaches the products they use: The Professional-level Macs like the G5 line.
- So Adobe not shipping Universal Binary products for their professional level until the professional grade hardware is ready is surprising to who?
Seriously, if you're appalled that Adobe et al aren't shipping Universal Binaries right away only means you haven't been paying attention. If you really are a professional photographer or someone who honestly depends on these type products you'd have to have been comatose the past year not to be well aware of all of this.Instead what I hear are a buncha wannebe-geeks who went out 'n bought the newest and shiniest and are now whining because they chose to ignore what anyone with half a clue woulda and most likely did tell 'em. You shelled out over a grand for a new product and couldn't be bothered to find out if the software you want to run on it actually would anytime soon.
Get the hell off /., I'm sure there's some support chat group out there for you on AOL somewhere. Try keyword "12:00-Flasher"
Frankly I just hope there is someone out there clubbing you monkeys over the head with instructions on how to use a contraceptive.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Plus, Apple has a low-end publishing competition: Pages.
Which competes with MS Publisher, not InDesign
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
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.
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.
Fuck X11 on OS X, it just doesn't cut it. I can't even input Japanese. So much for using the GIMP for anything here (I happen to live in Tokyo).
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Quick Google search has found at least two :
9 _4-10470005.html?v=1/
h e-day-foxit-pdf-reader-109741.php/
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php#/
Reviewed at
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3640-207
Downside : won't work in a Tab in Firefox. Then again, Acrobat doesn't always like to play properly with Firefox also.
http://www.lifehacker.com/software//download-of-t
Also :
http://www.visagesoft.com/products/pdfreader/
Next step : Doing something like this that is integrated with the browser. It's just a shame that MS would rather produce a new 'standard' than do it with IE.
See - who said Mac users can't be helpful to PC users sometimes.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
Japanese has admittedly THE most complex writing system in the world. It makes use of TWO syllable "alphabets", Hiragana and Katakana (if you can call them "alphabets" at all) and at least 1945 officiall Kanji (characters from the Chinese writing system, but partly simplified) plus some more in daily use. A good font comes with about 10000 characters plus it also throws arabic numbers and the latin alphabet into the mix.
;-)
Now there is no way to input that using just a keyboard layout, so it is not a matter of switching keyboard layouts for Japanese. You need a thing called input method. Which takes either your romanized input and transforms it into hiragana which you then can further transform into Kanji ("on demand" by hitting space), or some professional writers type directly in hiragana (but you still need to transform some of the syllables into kanji). In the OSS world there are two input methods widely used one is kanna and the other is wnn if I recall properly.
Now OS X has its own input method for Japanese (kotoeri) which works fine and does the job favourably, the trouble is X11 does know nothing of kotoeris existence, so if you want to input japanese in X11 in OS X you'll have to install kanna or wnn (in X11, OS X again will not know of kanna or wnn at all either) and the problem is that this is a somewhat esoteric affair, and you definitely don't even want to try to get it running. Even under Linux where you don't have to deal with two layers like in OS X (Cocoa/Aqua and X11) it is a pain and you rather just use a distribution that comes with kanna or wnn preinstalled. To make a long story even longer...
On OS X just don't try to use Japanese in X11 it's not worth the hassle. Also partly because usually OS X is through and through Unicode whereas AFAIK X11 is not (don't stone me if I'm wrong), that's yet another thing you'd have to consider when trying to use Japanese in X11 apps that weren't written to handle it. In OS X Cocoa apps it's no problem. Regardless of the application natural language, Cocoa apps always can deal with Unicode so you don't have to worry whether your app is able to deal with Japanese or not, it will be able to handle Japanese. Always.
Bottom line for me is: before I have to fuck around doing "the geeky thing" in X11 I'd rather wait for Photoshop or get a Cocoa app instead or anything that'll do the job, because if I wanted to geek around instead of getting some work done on my computer I wouldn't have gotten a Mac, I would've started with Linux to begin with
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.