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

blame Apple and/or Adobe?

[G3ckoG33k]

Sorry, but I will blame Microsoft.

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

Blame Apple?

[DragonHawk]

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

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: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: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: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: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: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

[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.