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Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 04, 2008 07:55 AM
from the takes-time-to-make-a-cup-of-cocoa dept.
from the takes-time-to-make-a-cup-of-cocoa dept.
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.
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64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Interesting)
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. :)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [adobe.com]
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 [macworld.com]
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen
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.
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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But AMD64 could be... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:But AMD64 could be... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [sourceforge.net]), 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.
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Adobe Flash on PPC Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Then you hand it to your QAers. "Good luck, fuckers!"
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blame Apple and/or Adobe? (Score:5, Funny)
It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but still.
Blame Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 sh
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32 bits should be enough for anybody.
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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 wi
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:5, Informative)
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bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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Let the blame game begin! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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hey (Score:3, Funny)
GIMP runs well on macs with xcode & developer tools installed.
Adobe's foot-dragging? Most users won't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Sheesh (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Use QT, like the rest of the world (Score:3, Informative)
Problem solved!
SwiftX
Adobe had no other choice (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Misleading title? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps a better title would have been, "64-Bit Macs Snubbed by Photoshop CS4"
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What will happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:What will happen? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I vote Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have my notes from WWDC 2000, however.
Re:I vote Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 h
Re:I vote Apple (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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