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.
64 bit is no panacea (Score:4, Interesting)
XP too...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
*whistles in disbelief*
No scratch that, it's not disbelief, I should expect it on
TFA says that there will be no 64bit version of CS4 for Mac OS X, not that they will not support it.
Someone is special and I don't think it was the poster before you.... Go away now, kthnxbi!
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
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 will be a lot of 32 bit apps will stay 32 bit apps.
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.
Re:LOL (Score:2, Interesting)
On behalf of myself and all the other "According to Jim" writers, I would like to offer you a job on our writing staff. We call ourselves the "yuck yuck factory" (get it? it's because we write jokes!) and could use a sharp comic wit such as yourself. Tell me, how good are you at writing my-annoying-mother-in-law gags? Because, since Peter left during the strike, we've been really weak in that area.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:3, Interesting)
Here at my work...it won't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides our budget limits, the other reason for this is that most of the printers we work with as well as publication companies follow a similar trend in their upgrade patterns. As it is right now we just finished migrating all of our offices over the last year from CS (a couple offices did have 2 already) to CS3. Depending on when CS4 comes out, we'll more than likely just wait until CS5 is released.
With that said if we run into an issue where we need to have the latest for some given reason chances are we'll require only InDesign or Illustrator upgrades as those are our main priorities. While photoshop seems to add in yet another ten ways to adjust the shadows/highlights of an image every version, it never seems to be high on our list of requirements.
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
I think that perhaps you are a little negative. Objective-C and Cocoa are different from C++ in some aspects but otherwise fairly straightforward. I believe a good C++ developer would have their first Cocoa mini application within a day and fancier stuff, such as drag and drop and custom UI components, within a week. From there on it only gets easier. There's a lot of power in the Cocoa UI kit.
What works in Adobe's advantage in this case is that they most likely have a pluggable UI architecture already since the application is already cross platform. The rest of the code base such as image opening and saving, filters, manipulation and so on is unlikely to contain even a line of Carbon code.
Re:64 bit is no panacea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
I will explain this very slowly and very carefully to you and "bright boy" who responded before you.
Mac OS X Leopard runs 32 bit AND 64 bit applications at once.
There will be a 32 bit version of CS4 for Mac OS X.
That means the ONE version that needs to be created for the Mac OS X platform WILL NOT be 64 bit native.
That is, you DO NOT need two write two separate applications to offer 64 bit AND 32 applications on a Mac OS X based machine. Only ONE.
In the case of CS4, the application will only run in 32 bit mode instead of being ABLE to run in 64 bit.
There IS NO separate 32 bit and 64 bit "platform" form Mac OS X.
In contrast, WINDOWS requires TWO versions of CS4 to be made, one to be compatible with the 32 bit platform and one to be fully compatible with the 64 bit platform.
There... I THINK I managed to break that down enough for you two geniuses.
Now I'll be accused of leaving out information or having slightly inaccurate details due to my attempt at simplification....
Re:I vote Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
$ file
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode: Mach-O universal binary with 4 architectures
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64</pre>
but almost no apps are:
$ file
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
$ file
/Applications/Chess.app/Contents/MacOS/Chess (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit executable ppc64
/Applications/Chess.app/Contents/MacOS/Chess (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
and most libraries are, but not all:
$ file
69
$ file
13
For example, QuickTime.Framework (for some reason) is 32-bit-only.
My Linux box, in comparison, seems to have only one 32-bit program, and it's part of GRUB. I doubt this has any noticeable impact on performance, but if my Mac is "fully 64-bit", then my Linux box is "super fully 64-bit"!
Re:The blame falls solely on Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
It won't, unless C++ changes significantly. The fundamental issue is that Cocoa needs to be able to call arbitrary methods on arbitrary objects when both are determined at runtime (see the NSObject "performSelector" method). As far as I know C++ can't do that.
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. :)