OSNews

Well to be fair, Apple has been touting XCode for the last 8 years and wasn't shy about pushing developers to using them over CodeWarrior. Not to mention the fact that they've been pushing developers to use Cocoa over Carbon, and after killing 64-bit Carbon last June, this should have been no surprise.

I'm not making excuses for Apple, and I'm sure Adobe has some good reasoning behind this, but this childish "blame the other company for [insert excuse here]" bit is getting old between these two companies.

Xcode and CW are IDEs; Carbon and Cocoa are APIs. While you're correct that Apple have been pushing CW users to move to Xcode for a while, this has nothing to do with what APIs you use.



For new development, sure. For existing applications, not so much. I think even Apple appreciate that tossing extremely mature, reliable and optimised codebases that work without extremely good reason is not a sensible way to run a business.



The surprise itself was that June announcement, which was a total 180-degree reversal of everything Apple had said and promised up until then. Don't forget that previous Leopards seeds were being shipped to Adobe and other developers with 64-bit Carbon GUI support already largely in place. I don't imagine the Carbon engineers were best pleased seeing a large chunk of their handiwork suddenly flushed down the drain either, but at least Apple was paying them to grin and bear it.

...

To be fair to Apple, I doubt they made this decision lightly either. My guess is that with their OS teams spread increasingly thinly across expanding and divergent product lines (Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc.), there was a pressing need to reign in that workload ASAP, lest it get completely out of control (c.f. Copeland et al). I mean, I've no idea who the poor devil was that got to inform Jobs that Leopard would be six months late, but I bet they're still sponging him out of the carpet even now. No, not an easy decision at all.

None of this, however, is of any help or consolation to the unlucky recipients of last WWDC's surprise kick to the crotch. At the very least, a heartfelt "mea culpa" from Apple and straight-up explanation of why they had to make this move would have gone some way to lessening the bruise.

Apple may have learned a lot about shipping successful product since the bad old days of the early 90s, but they've still a lot to learn about building developer trust and relations. Treating third-party vendors as valued partners in expanding OS X into a major mass-market computing platform - not making them feel like unwanted irritants that may be swatted down at any moment - would be a good start.

Isn't that the truth. ADC relations people are sometimes very rude and policies change far too often.

It's nothing new either. In the 1980s and early 1990s, they were as bad. They're only truly nice to the Premier developers.

Sorry, but Photoshop and Adobe are by far no longer Apple's bread and butter.

Next week's news: Flash on iPhone, 64-bit Photoshop coming to Mac OS X

This was my first thought when I read this also. Adobe needed to assert itself after the Flash / iPhone incident.

why is it nonsense? adobe has to do this whole great rewrite

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....

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

Microsoft typically directly supports its products for 7 years. When it comes to APIs, they only ever really break compatiblity every 10 years or so.

Apple typically supports its products for about 2 years, and they break API compatibility with EVERY release, which typically means once a year.

Linux is the worst when we are talking about ever-shifting APIs, the linux API will often break compatibility in minor bug fix releases.

When you look at it this way, you see why Linux has next to no commercial support, Apple has a moderate amount (although mostly from small shops with agile teams), and Microsoft is the one that ISVs love the most.

Eh, what? Tell me what broke during the transition from Panther to Tiger? From Tiger to Leopard? Apple releases a new version of OS X every year? There isn't an ounce of truth in anything that you've said.

The fact that there are applications that work on Leopard and not on older systems has little to do with broken APIs. It's because Apple is introducing new APIs and in the case of Leopard, Objective-C 2.0 which developers willingly adopt that makes it impossible to support older versions of OS X. If the developers were so inclined, they'd ignore the new APIs/features and target 10.2+. It is still possible, but nobody does it since most users rarely lag by more than one OS X version.



No? You're confusing API with ABI.



If Microsoft could have dumped Win32 and MFC support, they would have gladly done it years ago.

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.

It's probably more like they had a long time to prepare instead of something more instant?

Everyone is talking like the 64 bit version is going to be three times faster than the 32 bit one. For the average CS user the difference would hardly be noticeable.

People have weird expectations about 64bit apps and OSes in general. Lots of people seem to think it would atleast double the speed of their computer if they started using 64bit apps but that just is wrong. Most apps will not benefit from it at all, 64bit instructions mostly only benefit if you have to do lots of maths. In the case of CS it would likely only benefit things like filters, and even then only marginally. The GUI itself will not be any more responsive or anything than in the 32bit version, neither the generic tools available.

The good thing about 64bit CS is that it allows CS to access a lot more memory at once without the OS having to do paging. So, if you are manipulating several very high-quality images it might benefit you. Still the benefit will most likely be negligible.

I completely disagree. The effects are negligable for something like word processing. If you are doing anything even remotely professional with CS, you are going to feel the difference for anything involving encoding or other extremely CPU intensive tasks, let alone the difference the extra ram makes.

CG animation and frequent compiling, and gaming are the only areas I can think of where it would make as much of a difference.

The actual numbers disagree with your statement. See http://www.osnews.com/story/19566/Performance:_Vista_32-bit_vs._Vis...

Ignoring the Lightwave anomaly, going to 64 bit gets you an average of 5% performance increase in 3d modelling applications, about 10 - 20% increase in encoding performance, and +/-5% performance in games.

There are times when 64 bit processing will help (particularly with 64 bit integer heavy code), but for most applications the gains will be marginal to nonexistent.

I don't think Vista 64 bit is a good benchmark for something like this, Microsofts 64-bit story has been shakey since it started.

I agree 100%. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Premiere are a few of the application types that will greatly benefit from 64-bit. That is the point I was trying to make.

Most apps will not benefit from it at all,

In the general case, yes. When talking about x86 processors, not true. In 32 bit mode, an x86 processor has 8 general purpose registers to work with. That's not much, and limits the efficiency of code. When in 64 bit mode, you've got 16 registers. You get about a 20% speed increase just from that. If we were still talking PowerPC here, then yeah, 64 bit wouldn't help.

64bit instructions mostly only benefit if you have to do lots of maths. In the case of CS it would likely only benefit things like filters, and even then only marginally.

What do you think filters are, if not lots of math?

Yeah, 64 bit helps when doing math on huge numbers - which Photoshop probably doesn't do - but the bigger help is when using lots of memory, which Photoshop is known for.