Apple had to work closely with Adobe just to get Photoshop to compile-finally. Early versions of Xcode couldn’t even compile Photoshop-it barfed at the size of the project.
As a result, any software developer that wanted to build “Universal Binary” versions had to adopt an younger, much less robust compiler–Xcode.Ī lot of people complained that it took so long for Adobe to finally release a UB version of Photoshop for the Mac, but very few people understood just what Adobe had to go through to switch over 4 million lines of code from one compiler to another. CodeWarrior was, at the time, at version 9.0.
That required a switch from CodeWarrior (from Metroworks) to Apple’s Xcode so that apps could be compiled to work under both PPC and MacIntel. When Apple decided to drop PPC processors and go with Intel, the Earth tilted on its axis…this was probably the most major event in Apple computing since Steve Jobs came back to Apple and it was far more major in a technical manner because it required software developers to not only build their software for older PPC compatibility but also for the new MacIntel chips. How could this come to pass? Well, to answer that you must have a grasp on the recent history of Apple OS development and understand some of the radical changes Apple has gone through recently. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of grumpy Mac users complaining. Never the less, John has stated that the “next version of Photoshop” (CS4) will be 64-bit for Windows but not for Mac. So far, many people seem to be responding to the hype, not the reality of 64-bit. Well, for Photoshop users, that sounds like an attractive opportunity to speed up Photoshop, right? Well, sort of…for an insider’s look at what 64-bit might mean to Photoshop, check out Scott Byer’s blog entry about 64-bit, 64 bits…when? (note when the post was written-December, 2006-so it’s not like Adobe hasn’t been thinking about this for a while).Īside from the fact that 64-bit processing for anything other than mainframe computing is very new (Apple’s Tiger had “some” 64-bit libraries but was not a true 64-bit OS and only with Vista 64 has the Windows OS finally received something other than a cobbled 64-bit OS) and the installed user base for 64-bit is very small, most Photoshop users that aren’t pumping huge files through Photoshop probably wouldn’t receive much if any benefit. The bottom line is that 32-bit operating systems and applications can only address a certain amount of RAM and 64-bit OS’s and apps can address more. (geek warning: your eyes may glaze over reading it) Check this 64-Bit entry at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Well, to understand the 64-bit problem you really have to know a bit of something about 64-bit computing. There are very few things that Adobe works on that isn’t essentially equal on both Mac and Windows-except for this next version of Photoshop CS4.
Yes, it sometimes takes longer for the Mac versions-case in point Photoshop Elements 6.0 only recently was released for Mac while the Windows version was released about 6 months ago.
And while Premiere Pro had been dropped from the Mac, it’s back and better than ever.
All of the mainline CS3 applications are truly cross=platform with the exception of minor keyboard commands. It should be noted that Adobe has long been about as platform agnostic as any software company can be.
You can read the “official” Adobe statement on 64-bit here(it’s a 60KB PDF download).Īs might be expected, there was a whole lot of blame being slung about as well as comments from the digerati (on both sides of the argument) for why this has come to pass. John notes there will be a 64-bit version for Windows but not for Macintosh. Last week, John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop, posted a blog entry regarding Adobe’s roadmap for 64-bit versions of Creative Suite apps–notably Photoshop CS4.