Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only

HighWizard notes that Adobe Systems has shared the first scrap of information about its next version of Photoshop, CS4, and it's a doozy: there will be a 64-bit version of the photo-editing software, but only for Windows Vista and not for Mac OS X. Ars explains the history of how this conundrum came to pass — blame Apple and/or Adobe as you will.

Comments

64 bit is no panacea

[jgarra23]

just like the article says, it's not like it's going to make your app run any faster. In fact, with tday's machines, 64 bit will probably run slower than 32 bit...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[joaommp]

Well, it will run faster if you have a large pool of physical memory and do some heavy Photoshop editing, because Photoshop will be able to access more than 3GB of memory (remember that 1GB of the 4GB address space is already reserved for system code sharing) and not resort to it's own swap/disk cache system as much.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Kjella]

Yep, and memory prices have dropped *extremely* over the last year. If I was working with many and large photoshop images, getting 4x4GB memory wouldn't be out of the question. Honestly I don't need it, but if you're working with high-quality print images I can easily see why you might need that...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[elrous0]

32 bits is just fine...until the day that Apple announces better 64-bit developer support, at which time it will immediately become the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[alta]

Unless I'm mistaken the only thing 64bit color has to do with 64bit processing is that they both start with the number 64.

64Bit will allow the computer to deal with more data at a time, no matter what the color depth of the file is... It'll let the program have more memory. That will help a 64bit image if it's BIG, but just because it's BIG, not because it's 64 bit.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[larkost]

Apple has already announced (and shipped with 10.5.0) better 64bit support, but just not for Carbon. And since all of Adobe's products (except Lightroom) are Carbon applications, they have no access to GUI-integrated (single process) 64bit support.

Adobe has been dragging its feet on a port to Cocoa (about which everyone saw the writing on the wall a long time ago), aided by Apple's thinking that it was going to give 64bit Carbon a future (rescinded quite some time ago). I don't know why this is at all surprising to anyone.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Anonymous Coward]

you should inform college graduates then. we hire them all the time, full time, interns you name it. among the list of many skills like, word, excel, powerpoint, googling effectively, etc...photoshop is in there too.

you don't know photoshop, you're not getting hired. period.

we have a bank of macs, and we have several little tests that we've setup.

adobe would LIKE everyone to believe that their application is the EXPENSIVE HEAVY DUTY PAINT APP.

I'd say it's a paint app that remains expensive and hasn't added anything extraordinary to the feature lineup in 10 years.

We chose adobe photoshop in 1993, instead of a used Pixar Image Computer. Back then this stuff was ground breaking. We had a quadra 950 with 64 megs of memory (the memory alone was $5000). The license for photoshop was $500.

18 years later, computing power is cheap.

and Adobe has been playing safety defense for 10 years. The signs are all there. Buying up all sorts of smaller companies or competitors. Innovation is dead. Lot's of top down decisions. Microsoft, Autodesk, and Adobe...are all just the big fat slugs of their domain. They need to be taken out and shot.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[baadger]

x86_64 is more of a cleanup to the aging x86 ISA. Not only does it future proof the architecture against big memory requirements but it also does away with ancient segmented addresses, provides more CPU registers (leading the the possibility of more specialized register operations, I assume) and generally allows people to break ABI *as a matter of course* which is great because on AMD64 arch's you can *assume* the presence of MMX, SSE, and SSE2 instruction sets. Even Microsoft, anally retentive back-compat evangelists, took the opportunity in Windows XP x64 and Windows 2003 x64 Server to introduce further kernel mode memory protections ('PatchGuard')

No x86 software, *including drivers*, should be shipping in both 64bit and 32bit binary form, all of the problems you mention with 64bit are essentially proprietary software exclusive btw, and just highlight the highly broken software ecosystem Microsoft Windows has fostered.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[BlackSnake112]

If their are slugs, just use salt. It is cheaper, easier, and safer then bullets....

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Hal_Porter]

They should be concerned that Adobe got told that the API they relied on won't be ported to 64 bit though. That might affect other third party software vendors.

On Win32 the API doesn't really change when you go to 64 bit. And the LLP model means int and long stay 32 bit, only the pointers change size. So code that reads bitmaps for example won't break. Now you can argue about this, but it means if you've spent ages developing Win32 code it only takes a few days to port a large application to Win64.

Now Windows has ~90% of the market place and Apple has ~6%. If you were Adobe and getting to 64 bit on Apple required a lot more work in return access to far less of the market place, wouldn't you be tempted to tell people to use Bootcamp if they want to use the 64 bit version? Now I know Adobe will do the work at least this time, but don't you think decisions like this may cause other vendors to reconsider keeping their Mac ports going?

I know Adobe had a hard time going from PPC to Intel

http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html

The thing that Apple needs to realise is that independent software vendors are an asset to the platform. If you keep making them to extra unnecessary work - the transition from Metroworks to XCode and from Carbon to Cocoa - to support a minority platform when the majority platform doesn't require this, then they might well just tell people to use Bootcamp. Which they do already for Framemaker.

http://www.macworld.com/article/50465/2006/04/photoshop.html

"However there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac. A great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp."
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen Actually maybe Bootcamp is too much hassle for most people. But I've seen Parallels desktop, and it's really slick. Sooner or later someone will work out a way to get Windows applications running seamlessly on Intel Mac, if they haven't already.

So the hassle for Mac users running a Windows application is dropping all the time. And that will definitely affect Adobe's decisions whether to spend man power on refactoring every few months to keep tracking Job's whims. But in the long run, if the Mac has no native third party applications, it will go the way of OS/2.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Joe Decker]

... Adobe has been playing safety defense for 10 years. That's at least a bit glib, at least with respect to Photoshop and competing products. I find that most of the last few releases of Photoshop have improved enough to make it worth the price of upgrade, moreover, Thomas Knoll's work on ACR and the introduction Lightroom represents a significant rethinking of the photographic workflow. That having been said, the attempts at competition in the broad marketplace have been weak, Adobe does have a pretty entrenched "moat" around PS. I just don't see that translating them getting away with selling inferior products--if there were better products, I'd likely switch--it'd be a lot easier than switching, say, operating systems.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Overly Critical Guy]

Now Windows has ~90% of the market place and Apple has ~6%.

But not in digital editing, where Apple is the majority. Adobe will eventually release a 64-bit version because Apple users are their biggest customers. They did get screwed with Carbon 64-bit, though.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[jocknerd]

Yep, Adobe was told that Cocoa was the future for OS X development. And yet, they chose to stick with Carbon. Can't blame Apple for that one. Simple fact is Photoshop is designed for Windows first and then ported. So its not a native Mac app and doesn't take advantage of all the technology in OS X. If you want to see what I'm talking about, take a look at Pixelmator. While its not on par with Photoshop, it combines the power of ImageMagick with the underlying technology from OS X.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[MidnightBrewer]

Photoshop's legacy is all Apple. If you've ever tried to use Photoshop in Windows from, say 4.0 on (about the time I tried using it on Windows, instead of my Mac, where I started at 2.5), you'd know how horribly awkward it was compared to its smooth operation on the Mac OS. Adobe has been criticized on the Windows side for having a Mac-like interface as well, which Windows users have been forced to just get used to.

Adobe has a long legacy of making sure their application is rock-solid and reliable before releasing. They, of any company, were the ones to set the bar for what it's like to release incredibly stable, bug-free software without any major point release dramas to fix glaring mistakes.

Yes, ever since they decided it was a good idea to put a salesman at the head of the company who believes that it's not what you sell, but how you sell it that's important, they've started going down a bad road. Their subsequent attempts to lock the system down with draconian DRM etc. has not improved their image much. However, there is no way to compare Pixelmator to Photoshop. Pixelmator can afford to be nimble because it has no expectations to live up to and is a relatively limited application with little utility in comparison.

Photoshop is a (reasonably) well-thought-out system of utilities and tools that have always done a darn good job working within the limits of the processor and memory and still manage to offer speedy, capable performance and a comprehensive 3rd-party plugin architecture. Adobe's main crutch is that they can't afford to simply throw away doing things the way they've always done in order to move forward; their own success has locked them into evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, progress.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Swift2001]

Adobe has a huge problem: its past. When the Mac crossed over to OS X, Photoshop had a huge constituency that wasn't going to be happy about running in Classic, and a huge code base that needed some heavy lifting to translate to Cocoa. Apple provided the Carbon template as a temporary transition to OS X. Adobe farted around and took the easy way out. Imagine, they just discovered that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. So they'd actually have to delve into all that spaghetti and rewrite stuff. Apple switches to Intel, and to 64-bit chips. It's seven years into OS X. It's not a fad. Wake up, Adobe!

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Joe Decker]

Indeed, we're all going to see performance and features of Photoshop through the lens of whatever work we do with it. You'd be surprised how much time a "small" feature like the healing and spot healing brush have saved me, not to mention lots of the improvements to what one can do with layers and smart filters, but ... that's me, that doesn't make my experience any more valid than your own.

Still, I wouldn't entirely judge Adobe's "sitting on it's laurels" based only on Photoshop itself. I think of Lightroom as a reinvention of a lot of what Photoshop that I need to do, plus a lot of stuff that I would have used another application for in the past. It's not "enough" to replace Photoshop at version 1.3.1 for most of my work, but 2.0 (now in Beta) appears to correct the single biggest deficiency (more local adjustments) while holding to a much cleaner (and far less resource-hungry) paradigm for non-destructive editing, many things I'd do in PS with a full (non-adjustment) layer (100+ MB of memory usage) can be accomplished in both an easier to use and less memory-intensive manner. Moreover, Lightroom moves photographic work from a file-based to a database-based storage paradigm, which is quite a leap as well. I suspect even in 2.x most of my images will "see" Photoshop at some point during the process, but I'll be able to ditch a huge amount of the disk and RAM resource bloatage imposed by the layer-based "master file" paradigm. Cheers...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[dishpig]

You clearly don't know what you're talking about - there is (and has been for at least 10 years) a feature complete education version of Adobe Photoshop . Currently priced at $299. Somewhat reasonable if you consider it's a primary tool in your field. I've spent more than that on books for a single course.

The difference between a commercial version of Photoshop and an Education version of Photoshop is the splash screen and the license: education versions are not to be used for commercial projects. In other words, they're for learning, not making money on. That's the whole point - get it into student's hands so it is the tool they are comfortable using. That way they'll be more likely to want to use it in the future, when they are in the workforce. It's in Adobe's interests to make it feature complete.

The 'hoops' you are referring to seem to be a function of your institution's license and/or misinformation about the product. Any student could purchase a stand-alone, boxed education version of any adobe product with proper ID at any of the schools I have attended.

Does that mean all of the copies students use are legit? Of course not. That would be a silly thing to claim. Almost as silly as claiming all students will pirate Photoshop.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[OS24Ever]

According to this, 64-bit cocoa was introduced back in March 2007

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[PitaBred]

16 bit/channel is 64bit color (16 bits per RGB, and a 16bit alpha channel. Or 16 bits per CMYK if that's the way you swing). Just, you know, so you don't look silly next time you post.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

You are running 64bit on the wrong OS!
Linux 64bit apps are very fast and for photo editing I would use the GIMP over Photoshop. there are a lot of plugins for the GIMP too! Also I have a powermac G5 (real mac) running tiger. GIMP is very fast on that too! So I am not missing anything.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[amRadioHed]

If Apple did that when OS X first came out Photoshop would be in the same exact situation as they are now. The only difference is that by supporting Carbon for ~10 years developers could have been using all that time to work on porting big apps like Photoshop. It's seems like it's entirely Adobe's fault if they didn't take advantage of all that time they were given.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[prockcore]

Or Python or Ruby or Perl or Lisp. Cocoa requires a reasonably dynamic language and C++ doesn't make the cut.

Not true at all. wxWidgets and QT are both able to provide a C++ wrapper for Cocoa. I imagine that QT is exactly what photoshop is going to use. Then they can have the same code base for windows and osx (and linux if it ever comes to that)

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[adelgado]

2008 - 1993 != 18
2008 - 1993 = 15

Maybe you are using MS Excel?

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[TravisO]

Wow really, no useful features in Photoshop lately, well let me list the minor ones I know about that have been added since Photoshop 4 which is almost 10yrs ago now.

1. multiple undos
2. the ability to group multiple layers into a "smart object" making it easier to reuse image parts you've created
3. Save for Web ... finally you can customize the exactly details of an image and get realtime feedback how big the image is
4. text stays editable, instead of converted into "carved in stone" pixel data
5. layer effects (enough said)
6. major UI overhaul that's make it easier to use and more organized

and those are just the bits I use. Now how about you shut your whine hole and go innovate something yourself

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Vitriol Angst]

Your point about Apple being 6% and Windows being most of the rest used to be true. Apple is 10% now, and even bigger in the US.
I would be willing to bet, that of the "workstation class" computers, capable of doing PhotoShop, Apple has a much bigger slice of the pie, vs. say a cash register at Applebee's running Windows.
It's also a marketing fact that Mac users actually make up more than 50% of the people buying Adobe products. Not worth it to update the code? For millions of users when you charge $800 or more for a Suite? How much money does a program need to cost to motivate developers?

I'm in the process of justifying to myself the move from CS2 to CS3. Well I see improvements in After Effects and In Design -- but the improvements in Photoshop? I might see more improvement by spending the money on other plugins. I like the non-destructive filters and effects. But, the most obvious changes are just bug fixes for Leopard.

I have the total CS3 suite on another Mac I use. I'm really not seeing a real world difference in the product. the damn draconian DRM. It is a PIA with updates every week. I login with as a different user, and it tells me I need to re-authenticate. So, for what I do every day, I might be better off with CS2 and a better masking program on the side.

If someone comes along with something that does 90% of PhotoShop, gets rid of the performance bottlenecks and gets the stability of CS1 -- this person who has used PhotoShop since inception will jump ship. Especially if I have to give up a Mac.

>> My own opinion is that this is a shot across the bow of Adobe towards Apple. They want them to stop encroaching on their territory with applications like Aperture. Well, if Microsoft can't stop Apple from developing Quicktime, than I think this is a dumb move by Adobe. They are only going to force Jobs to listen to the developers who would like to take Adobe head on. Remember AVID? I can get a damn fine Avid symphony rig for pretty cheap right now -- and it can do a lot that Final Cut Pro can't. But FCP is about a community and the cost of the solution. Imagine a Mac bundled as an art station. How much would it take, for Apple to shore up the missing parts in Gimp, and give it an interface lift? Safari is a great end for Kerberos, isn't it?

I use both After Effects and Motion by the way. And Motion does not do everything that After Effects does -- but it does do about 80% and does it about 10 times faster.

I don't think it is a smart move for Adobe to use their product to threaten Apple to perhaps make development easier for them or not build a competing product. Adobe SHOULD be improving their product so that nobody could think of using anything else -- you know, the way I USED TO feel about their products 8 years ago. I guess they just want to sit on their rumps and collect money based upon really good DRM.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

[Lord Flipper]

I think of Lightroom as a reinvention of a lot of what Photoshop that I need to do...

My ex-wife was struggling with a demo of Photoshop, and had run into some serious lag and 'early-version' blues with Aperture. I gave her a full version of Lightroom, and racked up a ton of points, let me tell you.

I do work with already-existing images, for the most part, and use Photoshop and PhotoRetouch Pro. But she is a photographer (amongst other things) and absolutely loves Lightroom. I'd recommend it, based on my limited usage, and more on her real usage, to anyone out there who takes pictures and wants to pop them into their file systems with some serious editing on the way in. Really outstanding work on the part of Adobe... almost makes up for GoLive... on second thought, no... no, it doesn't. :)

Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[BladeMelbourne]

I guess there's no hope now...

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[MrMacman2u]

Hi, you must be "special". If a company makes such a statement (like not supporting CS4 on OS X), it is a good indicator that a Flash plugin for PPC is even more unlikely than before. Please let me know if you would prefer less syllables, or a clue.

*whistles in disbelief*

No scratch that, it's not disbelief, I should expect it on /.

TFA says that there will be no 64bit version of CS4 for Mac OS X, not that they will not support it.

Someone is special and I don't think it was the poster before you.... Go away now, kthnxbi!

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[gmack]

The point that Adobe as a company is slow adapting to new platforms and architectures. For a company of this size, it's pretty shameful...

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume your not a programmer. Code takes time to port to new interfaces. That's time that can be spent on other things. It gets even worse when some of the code is hand optimized or worse yet is a GUI app. Photoshop is a very large and very complicated GUI code base and therefore will take a long time to port.

That's life.. it's not Adobe's fault or Apple's. It's just a fact of the industry they life in.

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[Xtravar]

Aw cmon, porting isn't that hard! You just run "replace all" a few thousand times and then fix compile errors until it runs!

Then you hand it to your QAers. "Good luck, fuckers!"

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

[MrMacman2u]

*sigh and eye roll*

I will explain this very slowly and very carefully to you and "bright boy" who responded before you.

Mac OS X Leopard runs 32 bit AND 64 bit applications at once.

There will be a 32 bit version of CS4 for Mac OS X.

That means the ONE version that needs to be created for the Mac OS X platform WILL NOT be 64 bit native.

That is, you DO NOT need two write two separate applications to offer 64 bit AND 32 applications on a Mac OS X based machine. Only ONE.

In the case of CS4, the application will only run in 32 bit mode instead of being ABLE to run in 64 bit.

There IS NO separate 32 bit and 64 bit "platform" form Mac OS X.

In contrast, WINDOWS requires TWO versions of CS4 to be made, one to be compatible with the 32 bit platform and one to be fully compatible with the 64 bit platform.

There... I THINK I managed to break that down enough for you two geniuses.

Now I'll be accused of leaving out information or having slightly inaccurate details due to my attempt at simplification....

blame Apple and/or Adobe?

[G3ckoG33k]

Sorry, but I will blame Microsoft.

It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but still. ;)

You must be new here!

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

blame Apple and/or Adobe as you will

You must be new here, I don't even need to read the article to know MS and thier monoply is to blame for this :-)

Blame Apple?

[DragonHawk]

Blame Apple? I didn't think we could do that, here.

The blame falls solely on Apple

[antifoidulus]

they promised, and then rescinded, 64 bit Carbon, and didn't even bother to tell developers until WWDC 2007. This is the big problem with Apple's secrecy, sometimes they are secret just to be secret. There was NO reason not to let developers know there would be no 64 bit carbon as soon as the decision was made, but Apple waited until the last possible second for who knows why.

Yeah, Carbon is dead and they should be going to all Cocoa, but that takes time, and if it was your intention to kill Carbon, why even promise a 64 bit version at all? Why not state from the getgo that you plan to phase out Carbon and that if you want a 64 bit GUI you better be making it in Cocoa? Apple goes out of their way to piss people off sometimes I swear.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[zootm]

Yes, it's Apple's fault, and the blame should lie pretty much just with them. From what I can tell of the situation, though, I don't think they made the wrong decision - I think they just administered the right decision very poorly. They made the decision fairly late in the day, and without prior notification this will push back the schedules of many projects.

The article pushes this very even-handedly, and I do think that Apple's decision will pay off in the longer term. They just could have handled the short term a little better.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[elrous0]

I don't think they made the wrong decision

32 bits should be enough for anybody.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[LWATCDR]

"Yeah, Carbon is dead and they should be going to all Cocoa, but that takes time, and if it was your intention to kill Carbon, why even promise a 64 bit version at all?"
Actually killing carbon is DUMB. To use Cocoa you have to use Objective-C for the GUI. There is a lot more experienced c++ developers than Objective-C developers. Objective-C isn't widely used on Windows or Unix so cross platform is now going to be a bigger pain for developers.
This is going to be a great thing for TrollTech.
The end result will be a lot of 32 bit apps will stay 32 bit apps.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[Henriok]

Apple have never promised 64-bit Carbon. Everything that's in developer seeds are subject to change. As far as I can tell Apple didn't make the decision to drop 64-bit Carbon until about same time as WWDC'07, so Adobe and everyone else, including many developers inside Apple, found out at the same time. Adobe are going to migrate to Cocoa at some time or another, and it will be in everyone's best interesst to do it sooner rather than later. Adobe is lazy and they've shown it time after time.. just watch their poor support for OSX in the beginning and Universal Binaries. They promosed to be the first, but they were the last..

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[Teese]

Apple have never promised 64-bit Carbon. They did promise 64bit carbon, during the 2006 WWDC. It wasn't until the 2007 WWDC that they rescinded the promise. Before the 2007 WWDC, they backed up the promise with seeds with 64bit carbon support in. They removed that 64bit carbon support in the 2007 WWDC seed. Of course they also slightly redefined what carbon meant. It now means the GUI portions of what used to be called carbon. So there are parts of "carbon" that are 64bit. They just aren't called carbon anymore.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[LWATCDR]

There is a difference between being picking up a language and knowing the language. Yes a good C++ developer can start coding in Objective-C in a few days or maybe weeks. I would bet that it will take a few months before they are really comfortable with it. Then toss in Cocoa and you have a pretty steep learning curve. It will just make it harder to develop software for both Windows and Mac. There are few companies that will choose to drop the Windows market for the Mac market.
I would love to try Objective-C but the lack of bindings for GTK, QT, and Windows keeps me from putting in the effort.
It is a shame since I hear that Objective-C is better than C++ in many ways.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[Siker]

I think that perhaps you are a little negative. Objective-C and Cocoa are different from C++ in some aspects but otherwise fairly straightforward. I believe a good C++ developer would have their first Cocoa mini application within a day and fancier stuff, such as drag and drop and custom UI components, within a week. From there on it only gets easier. There's a lot of power in the Cocoa UI kit.

What works in Adobe's advantage in this case is that they most likely have a pluggable UI architecture already since the application is already cross platform. The rest of the code base such as image opening and saving, filters, manipulation and so on is unlikely to contain even a line of Carbon code.

Re:The blame falls solely on Apple

[bnenning]

I'm sure adobe was waiting for Apple to finally provide c++ bindings for Cocoa. It probably will happen eventually.

It won't, unless C++ changes significantly. The fundamental issue is that Cocoa needs to be able to call arbitrary methods on arbitrary objects when both are determined at runtime (see the NSObject "performSelector" method). As far as I know C++ can't do that.

bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version

[Anonymous Coward]

You misread the article:

The Lightroom news naturally raises the question: What's Adobe doing with Photoshop? In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only.

Re:bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version

[langelgjm]

You misread the summary (so did I, at first). It's not "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be For 64-Bit Windows Only," it's "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only."

Re:What will happen?

[oahazmatt]

At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa. The main reason for the Mac having only the 32-bit (Yes, CS4 will still be available for the Mac) is Adobe does not feel like rewriting an entire program at a moments notice, and I can't say I blame them.

Additionally, this shouldn't rule out the eventuality of a 64-bit Mac version. I would assume it is a goal and it will just not be available at launch.

Re:What will happen?

[nxsty]

If this carries out, this will pretty much end the debate on how Macs are "so much better for image editing than PCs" even though most of us know that that is rubbish. Kinda hard to do image editing when the primary tool used for the job isn't even available for your OS. What? There will be a version for Mac OSX, but only 32 bit just like the current version.

Re:I vote Apple

[gEvil (beta)]

Didn't Apple say nearly 10 years ago that Carbon was a stopgap solution and that you shouldn't particularly rely on it anyways?

But AMD64 could be...

[mrchaotica]

Remember, going to 64-bit on x86 can make programs faster, but not because of the extra bits. The speedup comes from the fact that, in addition to increasing the bits, AMD also added a bunch of extra registers to the spec.

Re:But AMD64 could be...

[jackbird]

Well, for those of us working with large images, programs speed up because they aren't constantly thrashing the swapfile.

Re:But AMD64 could be...

[chaosite]

Thats just the thing, they're not 'vendor-specific' registers. They're in the spec for x86-64, and both Intel and AMD implementations support them.

Besides, I think you were thinking of vendor specific instructions (Like SSE1/2/3, MMX, 3DNow!, etc...)

Re:But AMD64 could be...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The additional GPRs and XMM registers are not vendor-specific, as they are a natural part of the AMD64/EM64T platform, and Intel has adopted them as well, as they are a required part of the specification. These registers may speed up tight inner loops by allowing to keep more data a hand. Yes, I know that this is not going to help many applications, for example data structures with a large percentage of pointers/references (trees and graphs, for instance) might actually get slower on 64 bits due to the size increase and memory "speed" (unless you are using something like DataDraw), but expensive computations on packed homogeneous data can get much faster under right circumstances.

If you can generate tight inner code from a node tree, for example, even if the expression trees you can compile are very simple, things can get much faster, because less accesses even to cache equals more speed. You basically cannot saturate a modern PC CPU's execution units from memory today - if you're not running from registers and have to hit the memory to reach the big picture (pun intended :)) in order to just multiply and add some pixel values from several layers, you might be losing an order of magnitude of performance compared to the theoretical limit. If the operations are more complex, and you have dozens of layers and you are adding them and multiplying them and processing them all over the place, it is faster to keep the intermediate the values in registers even at the cost of having to generate some code. The other option is to spill the values into intermediate buffers and that is not a good thing for performance.

I do not think that the people at Adobe are dumb. VirtualDub uses this idea, and I think I read something about the Windows GUI kernel using such techniques as well. I fail to see why the leader in the market of graphics editors would avoid such opportunity.

Re:I vote Apple

[falcon5768]

Wasnt sudden at all, the writing was on the wall when Apple released OS X. Carbon was supposed to be a quick way to transition your OS9 programs to OSX. That was it. Adobe had no issues writing new programs in Cocoa (Lightroom) but continued to drag its feet on a port for the 64bit version of its landmark products, content to add GUI bullshit that many are not even sure was a improvement.

This was as sudden as Apple dropping OS9 development. It was coming and coming for years, but developers are more content to repackage old code, than to rewrite it. This is the same mentality thats screwing Vista development too. Developers are just plain LAZY.

Let the blame game begin!

[MrMacman2u]

Personally, I'm taking Adobe to task on this one.

Carbon was initially meant to be a "type" of backward compatibility with old Mac OS "less than X" applications so that they would require minimal re-writes of code to allow the program to be Mac OS X "native".

Apple has been pushing people to use the "more native superior" Cocoa framework for a number of years now by not only urging programmers and developers to use Cocoa but, by also enhancing the speed, stability and capabilities of Cocoa while Carbon stagnated (comparatively) and Adobe has constantly and stubbornly refusing to re-write ANYTHING they make to use the superior Cocoa framework.

This has been the case since the "Photoshop 7 ver.2" generation of Adobe's Mac products.

Lightroom uses Cocoa because it was made from scratch. That's it. If it was a hold over from pre-X days, I would bet my geek creds that it would be written in carbon.

Yes, I do fully realize that re-coding all of Adobe's Creative Suite to the Cocoa framework is a monstrous task, but Adobe has been severely dragging their feet regarding the switch-over which, I might add, they "hoped for in CS2 and "promised" for CS3!

That totally happened..... oh wait, it didn't! So now Adobe is caught with their pants down and doesn't want to admit it, despite Apple saying "You're not supposed to use Carbon anymore!" for years.

So no, this is not Apple's fault. It's Adobe's and I look forward to seeing any counter-arguments!

This should be interesting!

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[Tridus]

So no, this is not Apple's fault. It's Adobe's and I look forward to seeing any counter-arguments! TFA said that Apple promised Carbon would get 64 bit support in 2006, then changed their minds and cancelled it in 2007.

If Adobe expects Carbon to get 64 bit support (because Apple said so) and then it suddenly doesn't, its pretty easy to see how that is going to screw things up. That part is Apple's fault.

So since their Carbon version isn't going to ever be 64 bit, they need to do a Cocoa port to get there. Thats only necessary because of Apple's cancellation of 64 bit Carbon, so its Apple's fault.

(Though I tend to agree with TFA that Apple's decision to do that was right, in the long term.)

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[MrMacman2u]

You act as if planned and/or announced features/products have never been canceled or abandoned and Apple is the only one to ever do this. *COUGH!*M$VISTA*COUGH!**COUGH!*

They decided to cancel 64 bit support for carbon and announced it. It's not like they simply decided to ship the next update/version of Carbon as 32 bit only and never told anyone.

Adobe's fair warning came 10 years ago. Carbon has always been a stop-gap. IMHO, no amount of blame directed anywhere but straight at Adobe should be cast.

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[Blakey Rat]

I'm not talking about the basics, even GeOS supported those.

I'm talking about things like the integrated spell-checker, Services, drag&drop, AppleScript GUI scripting, etc. X11 on some other platform may have those features, but it definitely doesn't in OS X.

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[Ilgaz]

They are working on it but nobody reports issues. Telling Slashdot "X11 from Apple sux, it can't use services" is not the way to go. You say "X11.org can't use Services, I have an idea how to implement them". It is not like Cocoa, it is completely open source.

I am not a developer of any kind, I try my best as end user to report issues I spot.

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz .

It is not a bad X11 (as they moved to x.org) , in fact Apple made possible and lot easier for X11 apps run in average end user desktop by integrating it to launchd subsystem. If you type "xmms" from command line, X11 launches in rootless window and opens xmms. It is that easy. I use Kopete as my instant messenger since I installed Leopard (thanks to finkproject.org ) and various tools like Koffice.

Real issue with X11 apps could be the thing that most of them are coded with Linux in mind. Those Fink and Macports guys spare a lot of time to make them compile in a true Unix/NeXT environment on a OS which even openly warns its own core tools like Finder.app NOT to use depreciated functionality (from system.log). That is how Apple expects people to code on the OS X. They warn politely first, a bit serious later and it basically refuses to launch even with a informative crash.

Re:Let the blame game begin!

[anarkhos]

I'm tired of people who don't write Mac programs pontificating on crap they have no clue about.

Carbon and Cocoa aren't in direct competition. Carbon is a lower-level API that works as advertised. Cocoa is a higher-level API like PowerPlant or MacApp that, in spite of Apple's marketing, isn't some kind of all-encompassing masterwork of new technology. In fact, it hasn't changed significantly since the debut of OPENSTEP, and the fact it wasn't written for the same market as the Mac shows.

Cocoa has missing APIs and legacy issues stemming from its UNIX roots (pre-dating the Macintosh, which was written from day 1 as human-centric). Also, unlike PowerPlant, Cocoa is closed source. This means that when you have blocking issues, you can't puncture the damned beach ball unless your radar is miraculously answered several OS revisions from now. This isn't an issue with Carbon. There is a reason why all of Apple's high-end softwares are written in Carbon.

In fact, the only major practical advantage Cocoa has is Interface Builder. Some cool Carbon developers at Apple (aka, those who actually read radars) created the same for Carbon with HIView. One may ask how dare they improve a viable API when lord Steve has already given orders from on high that Cocoa is the New Wayâ. I'll answer because an OS is a tool, and those who find it useful use the tool. When Mac OS ceases to be the best tool for the job, we'll go elsewhere. Removing 64bit Carbon is removing a damned useful tool. Apple would be better off removing a different tool (the breathing kind).

If Apple gets rid of Carbon, they ought to provide a viable replacement or Mac OS X will be relegated to the same rubbish bin you'll now find OPENSTEP.

By the way, you'll find that some of 64bit Carbon still exists, albeit in private frameworks. Expect this list to grow as they publish 64bit Final Cut Pro (aka how to piss Adobe off even more).

Re:What will happen?

[john82]

As a matter of fact, Slashdot once again misleads with the choice of headline and half-the-story lead-in. Just a bit of reading reveals:

On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and it's a drag that the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver. We will get there, but not in CS4. (Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we'll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.) Hmmm. Not the end of the world after all.

hey

[Neuropol]

who cares.

GIMP runs well on macs with xcode & developer tools installed.

Re:I vote Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong as of 10.5 Leopard. It's 64-bit completely through.

Adobe's foot-dragging? Most users won't care.

[argent]

I've been using 64-bit systems since 1994... including ILP64 Alpha processors... and unless you're memory starved 64-bit software tends to be slower than 32-bit software... with one exception: there's a serious problem with 32 bit mode that the 64-bit mode doesn't have.

On the Alpha, the problem was that 32-bit mode requires trapping many accesses because the CPU is *purely* 64-bit.

With AMD64, AMD implemented a large register file efficiently, so a good compiler can generate better code for it. Intel's implementation of AMD64 doesn't seem to be as good, and since Apple is on Intel...

Also, Adobe has to have a 64 bit version for Windows, because Windows comes in 64- and 32- bit versions, but OS X has the same support for both 64- and 32- bit in the same OS...

So unless you're editing truly enormous images, far larger than most users ever deal with, this doesn't matter.

On the plus side, Apple's been trying to kick Adobe into converting to NeXTSTep/Yellow Box/Cocoa since 1997, and Adobe's knuckle-dragging over abandoning Classic is what made Carbon necessary in the first place, so I don't think Adobe's in any position to say Apple didn't give them plenty of warning.

It's been 11 years and they're finally going "oh, man, I guess Apple's really serious about this Objective C stuff!".

On the upside

[elrous0]

At least you can run Windows on Macs now.

Sheesh

[MyDixieWrecked]

At my old job, I worked in the art department doing production work and created a whole range of applications for CS2, Office, Mail.app and Transmit using PERL and Applescript. There's a whole workflow that's been built around the products they use on the platform that they use (OSX).

The guys in charge of purchasing hardware/software know little about the details of technology, although they gloss over eWeek and read the Technology section of the Times. Inevitably, they will read about this and try to convince the art department that maybe they should put Vista on the MacPros, or maybe get some standard PCs (if they decide to upgrade the hardware).

this news is especially relevant to that shop since they frequently get 2GB and 3GB files (and that's compressed!).

The good news is that the majority of their clients are running OSX, as well, and this lack of 64-bit photoshop should not cause them to start sending in even larger files... however, I do know that many of the larger clients get whatever the latest and greatest Mac is and max it out. This means that they could just get a copy of Vista and use Bootcamp.

Apple kinda shot itself in the foot with this one. Shops that can, may install Vista and get CS4 for windows just to keep up with incoming work. If MS gets Vista's usability up, and can offer a competitive experience, users may get used to it and stick with the platform... although I seriously find that highly unlikely.

Re:I vote Apple

[cowscows]

Yeah, but even Apple still writes some stuff in Carbon, and up to the point where they suddenly changed their mind, they had been telling everyone that 64-bit carbon was coming.

Nobody's really saying that Apple sucks for moving away from Carbon, the argument is that they should've communicated the timeline better to developers.

Not that I think giant developers neccessarily deserve special treatment, but you'd think it prudent to at least not waste a ton of time for a developer of one of the most significant programs available for your OS.

Re:I vote Apple

[MyDixieWrecked]

Please keep in mind that the cocoa framework has changed significantly in every release of OSX since the beginning. It wasn't until the last couple of years that it started stabilizing and applications remained compatible with new releases of the OS.

They're still adding new features and improving the way things work internally, and applications, although they run, have some weird glitches with new OS features; namely, older applications sometimes behave strangely when one uses Spaces.

I agree, adobe should have seen the writing on the wall, but they were kinda like a dear in headlights, not knowing what the fuck to do and just watching the semi barreling down on them.

At least they decided to go to cocoa. At least they didn't drop 64-bit support for OSX or worse yet, drop the creative suite altogether.

Use QT, like the rest of the world

[SwiftX]

Trolltech(/ nokia) is working with Apple to get QT on MacOSX using Cocoa.
Problem solved!
SwiftX

Re:I vote Apple

[dpbsmith]

No, my recollection is that they said exactly the opposite: that Carbon and Cocoa were co-equal and would be kept feature-comparable.

I don't have my notes from WWDC 2000, however.

windows 64bit tradition

[sgt scrub]

It must be because Windows has had such a long and stable history of running on 64bit hardware.

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/

Re:windows 64bit tradition

[cyberjessy]

I don't know if your comment was meant to be sarcastic, but:

Tiger had very limited 64-bit support (GUI apps ran in 32-bit mode). The fairly recent 10.5 is much better though.

In contrast, the Windows API's were well supported in 64-bit platforms since 2003. (Windows 2003 server, for IA-64 and later X64). While XP 64-bit was pointless, and soon discontinued, Windows APIs remain the same on Server and Client editions.

This would have allowed Adobe to start working on a 64-bit version anytime in the last 5 years.

Re:XP too...?

[CogDissident]

Wow, can nobody here answer the man's question with anything except sarcasm?

Yes, it will run on 64 bit editions of XP, it says so in the article. The summary just assumes that 64bit means "vista". Great slashdot editors as always./sarcasm

Re:What will happen?

[Raffaello]

Exactly. Adobe, along with all Mac OS developers were warned almost a decade ago - essentially a previous geological epoch in computer terms - that going forward they would have to move their apps from Carbon, the old OS 9 compatibility layer - to Cocoa, the new Mac OS X framework which has been the fully native Mac OS X framework since the developer previews of Mac OS X in the late 90s.

Adobe was busy focusing on the windows market and betting that Apple would go out of business so they put 0 effort into porting Photoshop to Cocoa - OOOPS!

Apple not only survived but thrived, so Adobe simply dug in their heels and assumed that Apple would keep Carbon around forever rather than risk losing Adobe. Instead, Apple simply built internal Cocoa replacements for all the Carbon software whose absence could threaten the platform:

Microsoft Internet Explorer -> Safari
Microsoft Outlook -> Mail and AddressBook
Microsoft Word -> Pages
Microsoft Excel -> Numbers
Microsoft PowerPoint -> Keynote
Adobe Photoshop -> Aperture

This 64bit issue is no one's fault except Adobe who have had nearly a decade's warning that they needed to move from Carbon to Cocoa.

Re:I vote Apple

[mini me]

Developers are just plain LAZY

Of course. That's why were are developers. When job X needs to be done, the average person will just jump in and get it done. Where as we developers, being lazy, would rather tell the computer to do the job instead. Had we not been lazy, we would have just done the job manually like the average person, and the software would have never been written.

Re:LOL

[Raffaello]

You're clearly unfamiliar with the history. Apple have been saying that Carbon was a temporary transitional framework and that developers should move to Cocoa since the late 90s.

Dropping 64 bit support for Carbon *GUI* code (yes, there is 64 bit Carbon, just not 64 bit Carbon GUI libraries) was just the latest in Apple's long litany of warnings that Carbon is eventually going bye bye and developers should transition to Cocoa, something they were told to do nearly a decade ago.

Re:I vote Apple

[jcupitt65]

You're thinking of Tiger, I think. Leopard is fully 64-bit. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html

Re:I vote Apple

[crusty_yet_benign]

They say lots of things.

They also said, as recently as WWDC 2007, that they would DEFINITELY support 64-bit Carbon in OS X. Now, they're shanking Adobe (and anyone else who believed them), by 'decommitting' from their previous commitment.

I'm as much an Apple fanboy as most here (4 macs in my house, only 2 are for work), but don't blame Adobe for trusting Apple.

Re:I vote Apple

[mzs]

Well in WWDC 2006 they had sessions about how to port your apps for 64-bit Carbon. I decided to go with it for a new mac project at that time. The reason was simple, at the time it was a linux/windows app that was written in mostly C++ and I did not want to bother with a bunch of obj-C glue code. I simply could put the Carbon calls into the C++ classes. I'm still okay, 32-bit carbon is still around, but yeah now I have been working on those icky little .m files.

Re:I vote Apple

[crusty_yet_benign]

developers are more content to repackage old code, than to rewrite it. I think "employed-ness" has more to do with it than "contented-ness". If code works, and you have other priorities (features/bug fixes), you'd be double-plus INSANE to waste engineering time on it. While that may not apply to folks with .org and .edu addresses, it's definitely a fact of life in profe$$ional $oftware development.

Adobe had no issues writing new programs in Cocoa And how, praytell, would you know that? Maybe gleaned from the same Apple Developer Marketing puffery that assured developers compiling OS X apps for Intel was as simple as checking a checkbox, and hitting build?

Re:What will happen?

[bhima]

Just want to correct one thing: Aperture is not a replacement for photoshop it is a competitor of Adobe Lightroom. Apple doesn't have a direct replacement for photoshop.

Adobe had no other choice

[courtarro]

When it comes to software development, companies prefer to make changes that affect the customer directly, and in the short term. The Ars article mentions that it would take a serious redistribution of resources to begin the port from Carbon to Cocoa, which means that feature development and stability improvements (things that the customer sees) would have slowed significantly. CS4 might come out with a few new features, but users would complain that it is basically a rehash of CS3 and there would be significant negative press. Arguments would intensify that Photoshop has hit a plateau, and future sales would be hurt.

All that would be the result of the forward-looking decision to port to Cocoa far before this point, and that decision would have had the potential to cause more problems for Adobe than they're seeing now by not having a Cocoa version ready. Today's news is bad press for Adobe, but it's not as bad as it could have been. In reality, people will get along with a 32-bit Mac version or the 64-bit Windows version instead. Since the problem of making a Cocoa port is now very customer-facing, the marketplace will likely be more forgiving of a feature stall over the next few years.

Um... Adobe just re-wrote CS3 from the ground up

[Toe, The]

Remember the enormous delay Adobe had in bringing CS3 to OS X? Their excuse for that was that they the Intel chipset was making them abandon their CodeWarrior-developed code and they had to start over from scratch.

So now they are saying that when they made the decision to start over from scratch, they chose the older, backward-compatible API instead of a forward-looking modern one? If their mumbling about the delay of CS3 were true, then there was no reason at all that they wouldn't have just moved to Cocoa right then.

Adobe needs to get their lies straight if they hope to be as awful of a company as Microsoft (something they seem to be striving for with increasing vigor).

Re:No, blame Adobe

[_|()|\|]

I'm sure Apple was alerting Adobe to the Carbon issue long before WWDC 2007.

Actually, John Gruber claims that's not true:

Several sources have confirmed to me that Adobe found out that Apple was dropping support for 64-bit Carbon at the same time everyone else outside Apple did: on the first day of WWDC 2007.

Misleading title?

[penguin_dance]

When I read the title, "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only" it sounded like it will ONLY run on 64-bit computers with Windows. Which sounds crazy that they would limit their market to 64-bit Windows Vista. But after you read the article and comments, it will be able to run on 32-bit computers also. There are 32-Bit macs, aren't there? (I realize the 64-bit is especially useful in all things graphic that take up a lot of memory.)

Perhaps a better title would have been, "64-Bit Macs Snubbed by Photoshop CS4"

You are still wrong...

[hummassa]

Okay, stipulated. Regardless, it's the memory address space that allows for the speed improvement when working with large files, not new JMP routines. JMP routines? Actually, the extra register things is capable of optimizing out _many_, _many_ memory accesses... leaving the path clear for the SIMD instructions to fetch repeatedly only the data that your extended addressing is capable of. Imagine (simplifying a little) some transform being done to an image, that alters some data:

for( all pixels in the image ) { x1 = red(pixel); x2 = (x2 + x1 *2 + 3) % MAX; blue(pixel) = x2 }

if x1, x2 are put in registers then your transform will fetch only the pages where the pixel values are; if x2 is in memory, then _each_ fetch of a page where a pixel are is interleaved with one fetch and one write of the page where x2 is. This means that the operation becomes probably three to four times slower.

Re:You are still wrong...

[fitten]

To add to your post, the folks at Cinebench were very happy transitioning from 32-bit land to 64-bit land (x86-64) because they were able to get rid of a lot of cruft and make use of the registers and such to achieve a significant speedup with their 64-bit version over their 32-bit version.

Also, in 32-bit land, you can use blocking algorithms to get by memory limitations. Not all operations must be done over the entire file, requiring all the data be in memory at the same time so it isn't like 32-bit can't do what 64-bit can memory-wise.

Re:What will happen?

[mc moss]

If you can use Aperture as a replacement for Photoshop, then you really didn't need photoshop in the first place.

There will be an x86_64 version for Mac...

[leamanc]

...but the Windows version is just coming out first. It's not like Adobe is totally abandoning 64 bit apps on the Mac. It's just that re-writing millions of lines of Carbon code is going to take a bit longer.

If you read the Ars article, and John Nack's blog at Adobe, you get a sense of the history involved here. Back when Apple's next-gen OS was going to be Rhapsody, Apple developers were looking at re-writing all their apps in what came to be known as Cocoa. Many of the big developers, Adobe among them, said "No way, Steve," leading to the birth of Carbon, to allow an easy transition from OS 9 to OS X.

It's been known for a while that Carbon would eventually be deprecated, but that still doesn't change the fact that it's going to be a huge job for Adobe. Adobe shouldn't be chastised for this move. They should be lauded for developing the an x86_64 version for Mac at all, even if its release will lag behind the Windows version.

Here at my work...it won't matter

[greymond]

I work as a Marketing and Design manager and we are, for the most part, OS X exclusive. We do have a couple older windows machines we use for some web related items, but as far as print ready designs go and even websites we're all mac based. That said we don't have the budget to upgrade every year when the latest and greatest items come out. Instead we usually upgrade software about once every two to three years and our hardware every four years (though small upgrades like memory are evaluated each year)

Besides our budget limits, the other reason for this is that most of the printers we work with as well as publication companies follow a similar trend in their upgrade patterns. As it is right now we just finished migrating all of our offices over the last year from CS (a couple offices did have 2 already) to CS3. Depending on when CS4 comes out, we'll more than likely just wait until CS5 is released.

With that said if we run into an issue where we need to have the latest for some given reason chances are we'll require only InDesign or Illustrator upgrades as those are our main priorities. While photoshop seems to add in yet another ten ways to adjust the shadows/highlights of an image every version, it never seems to be high on our list of requirements.

You clearly have no clue what Objective-C is

[danaris]

Objective-C is most certainly not a "proprietary language". It is not as popular and widely known as C/C++ or Java, to be sure, but it is, as far as I understand it, completely open.

Cocoa, Apple's Objective-C based API, is, I believe, not completely closed, either, but it's probably what you're actually thinking about. And it's an API, just like the Carbon API, or the Win32 APIs.

Dan Aris

32 more bits to suck at

[billcopc]

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I don't think Adobe should even try to write 64-bit apps when they can barely manage to make a 32-bit app marginally stable.

CS3 was a big improvement over CS2 in terms of speed and reliability, but that's like saying light poop tastes better than dark poop. It's still crap.

Re:I vote Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Some parts are:

$ file /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode: Mach-O universal binary with 4 architectures
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture ppc7400):    Mach-O executable ppc
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture ppc64):    Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture i386):    Mach-O executable i386
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture x86_64):    Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64</pre>

but almost no apps are:

$ file /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes (for architecture ppc):    Mach-O executable ppc
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes (for architecture i386):    Mach-O executable i386
$ file /Applications/*.app/Contents/MacOS/*|grep 64
/Applications/Chess.app/Contents/MacOS/Chess (for architecture ppc64):    Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
/Applications/Chess.app/Contents/MacOS/Chess (for architecture x86_64):    Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

and most libraries are, but not all:

$ file /System/Library/Frameworks/*.framework/*|grep "4 architectures"|wc -l
      69
$ file /System/Library/Frameworks/*.framework/*|grep "2 architectures"|wc -l
      13

For example, QuickTime.Framework (for some reason) is 32-bit-only.

My Linux box, in comparison, seems to have only one 32-bit program, and it's part of GRUB.  I doubt this has any noticeable impact on performance, but if my Mac is "fully 64-bit", then my Linux box is "super fully 64-bit"!

Re:What will happen?

[bhima]

Why would you say Aperture is not based on Cocoa?

As far as I can tell it is, not that I am the Apple developer that maintains it or anything. The plugin SDK is highly suggestive that it is a Cocoa app.

I blame Apple

[kuwan]

It's uninformed BS like this that makes me sick. Carbon may have initially been a "backwards compatibility" layer in the initial versions of Mac OS X but since that time it has involved into a fully native modern API that is every bit as native as Cocoa is on Mac OS X. Modern Carbon applications work just as well, look just as good and can have just as many features as any Cocoa application.

Also, prior to WWDC 2007 Apple has never said that "You're not supposed to use Carbon anymore!" Apple has been evolving Carbon since Mac OS X has shipped (HIViews, Quartz 2D, HIThemes, HICocoaView, Carbon Events, etc.) and if you had a large, complex application that was already built in Carbon there was no compelling reason to switch to Cocoa, especially since Apple announced and provided a working version of 64-bit Carbon up until WWDC 2007. Yes Cocoa usually gets access to new APIs first, but you can usually access these fairly easy from Carbon if you want to. For new applications Cocoa has been a better choice over Carbon as Cocoa apps are easier to create and maintain. But if you've already got a very large and complex Carbon application (such as Photoshop) then there's never been a compelling reason to rewrite the app in Cocoa since anything you can do in Cocoa you can also do in Carbon (although usually with a bit more work).

It wasn't until WWDC 2007 that Carbon really became a dead API. Prior to WWDC 2007 Carbon had been updated regularly including many sessions on building applications with Carbon at every prior WWDC. And I believe the WWDC 2007 build of Leopard still included a working version of 64-bit Carbon (it was removed in seeds after WWDC). When it was realized that 64-bit Carbon was dead people had to ask (including Apple Engineers) - What is Carbon? Because really there are many parts of Cocoa that are built on top of Carbon. You couldn't just take out all of 64-bit Carbon and still have 64-bit Cocoa work. It was decided that Carbon for 64-bit intents and purposes was anything GUI related (Appearance Manager, HIView, HIToolbar, Menu Manager, etc). There are still a number of Carbon technologies that are available to 64-bit applications - much of Carbon Events, Core Foundation, ColorSync, etc.

There are some Apple applications that are built on Carbon as well - iTunes and Final Cut Pro for example. Final Cut would benefit from a 64-bit Cocoa version, but it's hard to see iTunes ever needing to be 64-bit. It might as well remain a 32-bit Carbon application and no one would ever care.

I think that dropping 64-bit support for Carbon was the good decision in the long run, but Apple really dropped the ball in the way they killed it. They should have done it at WWDC 2006 rather than give developers a year of play time with the soon-to-be-doom 64-bit Carbon. Had they done that Adobe and others could have started work on a 64-bit Cocoa port in 2006 rather than 2007 and there would have been a slim possibility of a 64-bit CS4.

The bottom line is that the blame is largely on Apple for this one. Adobe was using one of the two APIs that Apple has officially supported and continued to improve since Mac OS X shipped. Apple even announced the transition of this API to 64-bit and provided developers with every indication that it would be supported well into the future. Yes, Adobe might have looked at Cocoa and seen its benefits - more modern and easily maintainable with easy access to the latest Mac OS X technologies. But those benefits are lessened when compared to the task of rewriting a very large and complex program such as Photoshop (let alone the rest of the CS apps). Apple should have dropped 64-bit Carbon in 2006 (by never announcing it) to give developers the time to rewrite their applications, rather than drop it just months before they shipped Leopard.