From John Nack's blog: "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."
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Member since:2005-07-06
I'll disagree here. Event though this article is very polite about it, it seems clear to me that this is 100% Apple's doing. They've built up way too much hubris over the years and thought, "what the hell, let's just ditch the Carbon API, we don't give a damn about how hard that will make it for Adobe and the other 3rd-party software companies." They never bothered to think about the fact that the cross-platform benefits of the Carbon framework *might* be missed.
If this were Microsoft this would *never* happen. They cater to their 3rd party developers; that's why they have so many of them.
For the first time (finally) we're seeing Apple's isolationist strategy coming back to bite them. I love Apple's design philosophy and their products, I'll even give them credit for their "idealistic purity" in this particular matter, but seriously, sometimes it just pays to be pragmatic....
Member since:2007-09-08
Rubbish.
Microsoft drop support for legacy APIs all the time. There's plenty of stuff out there that Microsoft don't maintain anymore, and that isn't supported by their current development tools.
Old apps can keep using them, but they can't expect to be able to use modern development tools, libraries, or even to work on 64-bit Windows.
Microsoft's idea of backwards compatibility, aside from causing all kinds of problems with forward compatibility, is binary only. Microsoft do not, and never have, claimed source backwards and forwards compatibility.
Besides, Apple are being pragmatic. They can not possibley afford to lug the backwards compatibility albatross around with them. Microsoft can't afford to either (see recent article on Windows 7), so what chance do Apple, a hardware company with a tiny fraction as many resources have?
Edited 2008-04-05 12:54 UTC
Member since:2005-08-22
They never bothered to think about the fact that the cross-platform benefits of the Carbon framework *might* be missed.
Yeah, because people are still writing MacOS 9 apps. The point of Carbon was it was an easy transition between OS 9 and OS X. It was always known that it would become less and less relevant over time and that you were supposed to use Cocoa whenever possible.
If this were Microsoft this would *never* happen.
Have you already forgotten the complete dropping of Visual Basic? VB.NET is a completely different language.
They cater to their 3rd party developers; that's why they have so many of them.
No they don't, they cater to their own needs and drag everyone else along for the ride. They have so many developers because they eliminated the competition in the mid 90's, leaving no where else for the developers to go.
Member since:
2005-08-10
There doesn't seem to be a huge issue here. Adobe isn't giving up on a 64 bit version for the Mac, It's just going to take longer due to Apple choosing to not implement 64 bit Carbon, and Adobe taking so long to rewrite their code to make use of Coccoa instead.
Some of Apple's own applications are still written on top of Carbon libraries, and I guess to an outside company, also using those APIs would take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" route.
It doesn't seem like either one of the companies is really at fault here, just a case of "shit happens." It may be irritating for Mac/PS users in the short term, but in the grand scheme of things, I doubt it's going to be a big issue.