Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only 478
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.
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:I vote Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (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 short term a little better.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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)
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I vote Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
Uhmm.. developers don't call the shots. Management does, and it is influenced to a large extent by the fiscal responsibility of the company in question (they do what makes money today and in the near future).
Re:I vote Apple (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 programs available for your OS.
Re:hey (Score:1, Insightful)
I like the GIMP just as much as anyone, but I have no illusions that it's a full Photoshop replacement.... especially for the professional market who would benefit most from 64-bit.
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.)
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
windows 64bit tradition (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/ [gimp.org]
Re:XP too...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Let the blame game begin! (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:I vote Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I vote Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
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.
Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Misleading title? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps a better title would have been, "64-Bit Macs Snubbed by Photoshop CS4"
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.
Re:What will happen? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:3, Insightful)
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.