Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only

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

just like the article says, it's not like it's going to make your app run any faster. In fact, with tday's machines, 64 bit will probably run slower than 32 bit...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

Well, it will run faster if you have a large pool of physical memory and do some heavy Photoshop editing, because Photoshop will be able to access more than 3GB of memory (remember that 1GB of the 4GB address space is already reserved for system code sharing) and not resort to it's own swap/disk cache system as much.

Re:64 bit is no panacea

Yep, and memory prices have dropped *extremely* over the last year. If I was working with many and large photoshop images, getting 4x4GB memory wouldn't be out of the question. Honestly I don't need it, but if you're working with high-quality print images I can easily see why you might need that...

Re:64 bit is no panacea

you should inform college graduates then. we hire them all the time, full time, interns you name it. among the list of many skills like, word, excel, powerpoint, googling effectively, etc...photoshop is in there too.

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

Adobe has a huge problem: its past. When the Mac crossed over to OS X, Photoshop had a huge constituency that wasn't going to be happy about running in Classic, and a huge code base that needed some heavy lifting to translate to Cocoa. Apple provided the Carbon template as a temporary transition to OS X. Adobe farted around and took the easy way out. Imagine, they just discovered that there would be no 64-bit Carbon. So they'd actually have to delve into all that spaghetti and rewrite stuff. Apple switches to Intel, and to 64-bit chips. It's seven years into OS X. It's not a fad. Wake up, Adobe!

Re:64 bit is no panacea

They should be concerned that Adobe got told that the API they relied on won't be ported to 64 bit though. That might affect other third party software vendors.

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]

"However there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac. A great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp."
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen

Actually maybe Bootcamp is too much hassle for most people. But I've seen Parallels desktop, and it's really slick. Sooner or later someone will work out a way to get Windows applications running seamlessly on Intel Mac, if they haven't already.

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:64 bit is no panacea

Yep, Adobe was told that Cocoa was the future for OS X development. And yet, they chose to stick with Carbon. Can't blame Apple for that one. Simple fact is Photoshop is designed for Windows first and then ported. So its not a native Mac app and doesn't take advantage of all the technology in OS X. If you want to see what I'm talking about, take a look at Pixelmator. While its not on par with Photoshop, it combines the power of ImageMagick with the underlying technology from OS X.

But AMD64 could be...

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.

Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

I guess there's no hope now...

Re:Adobe Flash on PPC Linux?

Aw cmon, porting isn't that hard! You just run "replace all" a few thousand times and then fix compile errors until it runs!

Then you hand it to your QAers. "Good luck, fuckers!"

blame Apple and/or Adobe?

Sorry, but I will blame Microsoft.

It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but still. ;)

Blame Apple?

Blame Apple? I didn't think we could do that, here.

The blame falls solely on Apple

they promised, and then rescinded, 64 bit Carbon, and didn't even bother to tell developers until WWDC 2007. This is the big problem with Apple's secrecy, sometimes they are secret just to be secret. There was NO reason not to let developers know there would be no 64 bit carbon as soon as the decision was made, but Apple waited until the last possible second for who knows why.

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:The blame falls solely on Apple

Apple have never promised 64-bit Carbon.

They did promise 64bit carbon, during the 2006 WWDC. It wasn't until the 2007 WWDC that they rescinded the promise. Before the 2007 WWDC, they backed up the promise with seeds with 64bit carbon support in. They removed that 64bit carbon support in the 2007 WWDC seed. Of course they also slightly redefined what carbon meant. It now means the GUI portions of what used to be called carbon. So there are parts of "carbon" that are 64bit. They just aren't called carbon anymore.

Let the blame game begin!

Personally, I'm taking Adobe to task on this one.

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!

So no, this is not Apple's fault. It's Adobe's and I look forward to seeing any counter-arguments!

TFA said that Apple promised Carbon would get 64 bit support in 2006, then changed their minds and cancelled it in 2007.

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.)

Adobe's foot-dragging? Most users won't care.

I've been using 64-bit systems since 1994... including ILP64 Alpha processors... and unless you're memory starved 64-bit software tends to be slower than 32-bit software... with one exception: there's a serious problem with 32 bit mode that the 64-bit mode doesn't have.

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!".

Um... Adobe just re-wrote CS3 from the ground up

Remember the enormous delay Adobe had in bringing CS3 to OS X? Their excuse for that was that they the Intel chipset was making them abandon their CodeWarrior-developed code and they had to start over from scratch.

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:I vote Apple

Didn't Apple say nearly 10 years ago that Carbon was a stopgap solution and that you shouldn't particularly rely on it anyways?

Re:I vote Apple

Wasnt sudden at all, the writing was on the wall when Apple released OS X. Carbon was supposed to be a quick way to transition your OS9 programs to OSX. That was it. Adobe had no issues writing new programs in Cocoa (Lightroom) but continued to drag its feet on a port for the 64bit version of its landmark products, content to add GUI bullshit that many are not even sure was a improvement.

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.

Re:I vote Apple

You're thinking of Tiger, I think. Leopard is fully 64-bit. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html [apple.com]

Re:What will happen?

As a matter of fact, Slashdot once again misleads with the choice of headline and half-the-story lead-in. Just a bit of reading reveals:

On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and it's a drag that the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver. We will get there, but not in CS4. (Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we'll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.)

Hmmm. Not the end of the world after all.

Re:What will happen?

Exactly. Adobe, along with all Mac OS developers were warned almost a decade ago - essentially a previous geological epoch in computer terms - that going forward they would have to move their apps from Carbon, the old OS 9 compatibility layer - to Cocoa, the new Mac OS X framework which has been the fully native Mac OS X framework since the developer previews of Mac OS X in the late 90s.

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:What will happen?

Just want to correct one thing: Aperture is not a replacement for photoshop it is a competitor of Adobe Lightroom. Apple doesn't have a direct replacement for photoshop.

Re:bad summary - there will be a 32-bit version

You misread the summary (so did I, at first). It's not "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be For 64-Bit Windows Only," it's "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Will Be 64-Bit For Windows Only."