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Adobe Universal Binaries... in 2007

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Feb 02, 2006 03:13 PM
from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.
Businesses Intel Apple
bo peterberg writes "According to a pdf on Adobe's website, they remain committed to supporting Intel-based Macs. However, Intel-based Macs will not be supported until the next upgrade of all creative products. The current version will not be re-released."
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Adobe Universal Binaries... in 2007 50 Comments More /

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  • Go Aperture! (Score:3, Funny)

    by adavies42 (746183) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:17PM (#14629159)
    So much for LightTable destroying Aperture!

    • Re:Go Aperture! (Score:5, Informative)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:27PM (#14629280)

      So much for LightTable destroying Aperture!

      Actually, LightTable is the exception. They announced they will have a beta of it available shortly. Now if only Apple would release a competitor to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Framemaker maybe they'd come out with new versions of those products as well.

      • It would be unwise for Apple to release a photoshop competitor. Look what happened to the Mac version of Premier when Apple released Final Cut Pro...

        • Re:Go Aperture! (Score:5, Funny)

          by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Thursday February 02 2006, @04:07PM (#14629728)

          It would be unwise for Apple to release a photoshop competitor. Look what happened to the Mac version of Premier when Apple released Final Cut Pro...

          You mean when Adobe killed it and most of the users migrated to Final Cut Pro, making Apple a lot of money?

          • Re:Go Aperture! (Score:3, Interesting)

            by jcr (53032)
            Good point.

            Personally, I'd love to see anyone, whether it's Apple or somebody else, bring out an image editing program that uses CoreImage to its full potential.

            Photoshop is a relic, running in Adobe's home-grown Mac OS 7 compatibility environment. They can't even handle a floating-point frame buffer yet.

            -jcr
            • Good point. Personally, I'd love to see anyone, whether it's Apple or somebody else, bring out an image editing program that uses CoreImage to its full potential. Photoshop is a relic, running in Adobe's home-grown Mac OS 7 compatibility environment. They can't even handle a floating-point frame buffer yet.

              No kidding. Its only now that Adobe is even getting their shit together enough to port their codebases to Xcode. If they had done this earlier, they would not have so much work ahead of them. (To be fa

              • Re:Go Aperture! (Score:5, Insightful)

                by jcr (53032) <[jcr] [at] [mac.com]> on Thursday February 02 2006, @08:18PM (#14631560) Journal
                I don't know that much about the GIMP but I wonder if they would ever be able to take advantage of something like CI. There is portability to maintain...

                Well, that really is the heart of the problem. Anyone who insists on doing a cross-platform image editor won't use the full capabilities of any platform.

                -jcr

                • That's why I'd shell out full-bloat-rip-me-off-and-sodomize-me just-as-adobe-does-prices for a full-blown Cocoa and Mac only Photoshop killer app. I REALLY WOULD!

                  It's such a shame that the TIFFany3 developers never did anything with that application. The GUI was fubar, with some work on that app it could have left Photoshop dead in the water, but then again, it's them we have to thank for QuartzExtreme and CoreImage, so maybe it was a good thing after all that they got bought out by Apple.

          • Not just Premiere (Score:5, Interesting)

            by thatguywhoiam (524290) on Thursday February 02 2006, @07:53PM (#14631445)
            You mean when Adobe killed it and most of the users migrated to Final Cut Pro, making Apple a lot of money?

            That's not quite what happened...

            Premiere was not discontinued for Mac until well after Final Cut's launch. Apple basically stole the entire market from them. When sales fell through the floor, Adobe discontinued the Mac version of Premiere, and also announced that basically all of their software should be run on PCs for best results, a historical first. This was essentially the beginnings of the major Apple/Adobe rivalry. (They were really pissed about iPhoto as well.)

            It doesn't get mentioned a lot around here, but Premiere was hardly the only Apple casualty in that space; they have virtually eaten the nonlinear editing space in a very short span of time. Remember Avid? They are still around but not nearly the force they once were, a name pretty much synonymous with high end / cinema nonlinear editing. Media 100 also. Final Cut is a juggernaut, a totally killer app. And Apple has Final Cut Express to compete with as well. And then they picked up Shake and RAYZ and a few others to eat a piece of what SGI used to totally dominate.

            The really funny part is, Final Cut started its life (as I know the story) at Adobe, as a radical new verison of Premiere after v4. Premiere 4 was super popular, but people who know it and used it will all tell you that v5 sucked big time. The reason for this is, the Premiere team had this great new interface but Adobe didn't want to deviate so radically from the old Premiere look and feel. In frustration a large number of them quit and went over to Macromedia, who started developing their own editing app called Final Cut. It evolved for a bit there, but Macromedia got cold feet and had a sort of had a truce with Adobe at the time, so they sold the unreleased codebase... to Apple.

            (This is hearsay I received from a high mucketymuck at Adobe who was bombed on Bailey's at the time, so take as you will.)

            • Re:Not just Premiere (Score:5, Interesting)

              by jcr (53032) <[jcr] [at] [mac.com]> on Thursday February 02 2006, @08:28PM (#14631601) Journal
              Your account gybes quite well with what I heard at Apple. Of course, the developers in question weren't able to take any of their code from Adobe to Macromedia, but the money spent on a development project really ends up in the brains of the developers, not in the source code.

              One thing to fill in: Apple got into the video-editing business because Avid was actively leaning on customers to abandon the Mac. I do recall a story of one customer asking an Avid rep: "what about Mac compatibility?", and being told "Nobody has to be Mac compatible anymore" with a smirk. The customer told the Avid guy: "YOU have to be compatible with your installed base, asshole!"

              Before I got to Apple, I really had no idea how much Avid had alienated their customers. It'll be a business-school case study someday. ;-)

              -jcr
            • who was bombed on Bailey's at the time

              you can do that?
    • So much for LightTable destroying Aperture!

      Actually, Lightroom is expected to be Universal much sooner, as it is written largely in Lua [gusmueller.com], with the rest in Cocoa. Quite unlike the rest of Adobe's stuff.
      • Exactly. The real reason they aren't switching over CS 2 is because they can't. They've been using CodeWarrior forever and they would probably still be putting off moving away from it if it wasn't for the fact that they have to in order to support Universal Binaries. It'll take them to 2007 just getting it to build correctly.
        • Even if that weren't the case, Adobe has no real financial incentive to do a rewrite of the current apps. From Adobe's point of view, it's much better to develop the next version and then satisfying all that pent up demand. For those that need to run PS (or whatever) NOW, Apple is still selling perfectly capable and speedy G5s (including a quad G5).

          I bought a G4 powerbook late last year, knowing there would be Intel powerbooks sometime this year. I don't mind waiting a rev. or two or even three, at which po

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Racher (34432) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:17PM (#14629165)
    ... Quark Inc. has announced the will create a universal binary of their flagship product QuarkXpress sometime before in 2070.
    • Not sure if you're trying to be funny or what, but in case you didn't already hear, Steve Jobs singled out Quark in his keynote as already having a Universal Binary for QuarkXPress.

      Yeah, I was shocked as well.
      • I didn't watch the keynote, but let me say.

        HOLY SH!T!
            • Not exactly. Not having anybody left and outsourcing the entire thing to India will do that to you. It took them that long to get the engineers in India up to speed in OSX.
        • If your app is 100% cocoa, then producing an Intel binary is as simple as a recompile.

          Almost. I had a few developers who needed to tweak a few things to build for Intel, but most of them were done the first day of WWDC '05.

          -jcr
  • This is kind of a deal breaker for me, as I make my living using Photoshop to a VERY large degree. Using it with Rosetta may be "passable"...it's just not going to cut it in the long run. I was hoping that Adobe would have an upgrade for existing customers, but I guess not.

    Though they may change their minds, who knows. So much for upgrading this year. I suppose this will work out better in the end, as the Intel Macs will get a chance to mature a little more.
    • Using it with Rosetta may be "passable"...it's just not going to cut it in the long run.

      My wife has an iMac, but we don't follow the details that closely. Have you actually seen Photoshop under emulation, or are you just speculating that it will be unusable for you? You may be 100% correct, but I don't know enough about it to make the call.

    • Even after I knew the Intel Macs were coming, I chose to invest in a Dual-Processor Dual-Core G5. Why throw money at the platform that is guaranteed to be phased out?

      I worked through the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC. I worked through the transition of OS 9 to OS X. These transitions are NEVER easy. I chose to get the most power I could out of the platform that currently works best. I'll wait to get an Intel Mac until they are well into year two of general use, and only after my must-have applications have had at least one set of bug fixes released to their Universal Binary versions. :)

      -Chris
      • Lol, who was crying? I'm looking to possibly cross-grade, that's all. I was going to go for an Intel Mac, but now I just might wait. Wasn't crying about it, just stating a fact. And as I said, perhaps the Intel based makes and OSX will get a better "shake out" by the time I get around to actually cross-grading....if ever.

        Calm down sparky.

  • I was afraid of this.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SleepyHappyDoc (813919) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:19PM (#14629197)
    How many companies are going to use the Intel transition to force paid upgrades? I can see some companies offering a 'special deal', pay $X for the universal binary edition, so it'll actually run on your new computer. Sort of a variation on the DVD re-release double-dip, except with a gun to the (figurative) head. (and no, I know they don't force you to buy their software, but if you're a graphics artist in a Mac only shop, your IT department will have to buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac, whenever your machine gets upgraded).

    Looks like windfall time for Mac software vendors.
    • Actually, they won't have to re-buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac. Rosetta allows the old version to work, at least in theory, with caveats.

      They admit it'll run slower, but they don't provide numbers, so I'll be curious to see if it's gun-to-the-head-must-upgrade slower, or just "hey, this isn't quite as snappy as it used to be" slower. The caveat is that Version Cue Workspace Server doesn't work at all. I wonder if they can patch that.

      It's still a windfall for Mac software vendors.
      • A Slashdot story posted earlier had some benchmark numbers comparing Photoshop on the Intel iMac to a G5 model. IIRC they were surprisingly "acceptable". Some operations took a very long time - such as resizing I think was one - but overall I think you could live with it. Drawing from this, I'd imagine a MacBook Pro wouldn't do very badly compared to a PowerBook G4.

      • Re:I was afraid of this.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by bursch-X (458146) on Thursday February 02 2006, @09:41PM (#14632000) Homepage
        Dear G-funk,

        We don't have $5000 laptops.
        But we'd be delighted to charge you double on our top model to get to a price of just a little less than 5000$.

        Sincerely,
        Steve Jobs
        CEO, Apple

        P.S.:
        Fuck Adobe.
        Watch for PhotoShopMyAss Pro 1.0 coming out soon from Apple

  • 64 bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:20PM (#14629203)
    The first IntelMacs use 32 bit CPUs, but Intel will release 64 bit version of the CPU later this year. Will these first IntelMacs be obsoleted? OS X for the Intel CPUs will obviously go to 64 bit --- need it for the PowerMacs as their power users won't want to lower memory capacity. Maybe Adobe and other third party software vendors see this situation and prefer to just wait and do only 64 bit Intel native binaries?
    • Unless intel and/or apple deviate dramatically from the existing methods for supporting 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit system, the only thing that will happen to your 32 bit intel/mac binaries is that they'll run a little slower than the 64 bit ones, on the same system, and they may even run faster on the new system than they do on the current one - if intel can get their shit together to the same degree as AMD, that is.

  • No Surprises Here! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macentric (914166) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:21PM (#14629217)
    There are no real surprises here. This is very similar to how they transitioned Photoshop and Illustrator to Mac OS X several years ago. My main hopes are that CS3 is not living half in two worlds like they did with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7.

    On the bright side, if Adobe keeps up the status quo on Creative Suite 3 then we will see all of the Apps that ship in Creative Suite, ship together. Acrobat 5 was horrible on Mac OS X, the Acrobat application ran natively in OS X, but the distiller ran in Classic and suffered severe performance penalties as a result. Hopefully all of the apps tranistioning around the same time will leave a better taste in their customers mouths.

    I am glad to see them attempting to show off their xCode developemtn prowess by delivering the LightRoom beta earlier than their other software packages.

  • Shot themselves in the foot & jumped the gun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by httpamphibio.us (579491) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:48PM (#14629524)
    Adobe isn't updating until 2007, we can probably assume the same for the Macromedia apps. Native Instruments (Reaktor, Absynth, Kontakt) is going to be rolling out products starting at the end of Q2 2006 to Q1 2007. Cycling '74 (Max/MSP, pluggo, Jitter) is estimating "the end of 2006" but they haven't even come close to meeting a deadline in many years, so that'll probably be mid-2007. Steinberg (Cubase) has said they'll update "sometime" in 2006.

    So... exactly who is the market for the new Intel products? The swarms of iPod owners that own Apple products for reasons of fashion more than functionality? It seems like none of the apps that high-end Apple users actually use aren't going to be out for quite some time.

    But they sorta had to release the Intel products so soon, though didn't they? All the hardcore Apple guys I knew said they wouldn't be buying any new stuff until the transition to Intel. Oh well...
    • It seems like none of the apps that high-end Apple users actually use aren't going to be out for quite some time.

      Except the Apple Pro applications (Final Cut, DVD Studio, Motion, Logic, Shake, Soundtrack etc. They are going to be released as Universal in Feb / March [apple.com]

    • So... exactly who is the market for the new Intel products? ...It seems like none of the apps that high-end Apple users actually use aren't going to be out for quite some time.

      You mean somebody still believes the hype that Apple users are mostly graphic artists these days? I know a lot of people including a few who are artists that use macs. Most mac users I know, however, are programmers and scientists. Another large number are non-power users who basically use the Web, e-mail, and some word processing

  • What Would Macromedia Have Done?

    You really have to wonder whether they would've decided to update their apps sooner. Though given that Intel Macs for developers have been available for at least 6 months, maybe they weren't far enough along on the transition at the time of the merger.

  • Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by HellYeahAutomaton (815542) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:54PM (#14629576)
    So they're covering up their move to Java? :)
  • This is the EXACT same bullshit they pulled when OS 9 went to OS X, sept worse, since there really isnt nearly as much to translate between the packages. Honestly it almost seems Adobe does this to screw with Apple, since they know no production houses (Apples bread and butter) will go over to the new systems unless they update these programs and even they it will take a while.

  • Quit yer whining! (Score:5, Informative)

    by maggard (5579) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Thursday February 02 2006, @05:43PM (#14630595) Homepage Journal
    1. Apple has ALWAYS made it clear their move to Intel would be in stages.
    2. Apple has ALWAYS said it would be done from their lower-end products to their upper-end.
    3. The iMac is Apple's entry-level product.
    4. Therefore the iMac being iNtelicized first is in line with Apple's announced plans.
    5. With the iMac being Apple's entry-level consumer product it doesn't have a large professional user base.
    6. Therefore professionals, who have large investments in hardware and software, are unlikely to be affected by the Intel transition until it reaches the products they use: The Professional-level Macs like the G5 line.
    7. So Adobe not shipping Universal Binary products for their professional level until the professional grade hardware is ready is surprising to who?
    Seriously, if you're appalled that Adobe et al aren't shipping Universal Binaries right away only means you haven't been paying attention. If you really are a professional photographer or someone who honestly depends on these type products you'd have to have been comatose the past year not to be well aware of all of this.

    Instead what I hear are a buncha wannebe-geeks who went out 'n bought the newest and shiniest and are now whining because they chose to ignore what anyone with half a clue woulda and most likely did tell 'em. You shelled out over a grand for a new product and couldn't be bothered to find out if the software you want to run on it actually would anytime soon.

    Get the hell off /., I'm sure there's some support chat group out there for you on AOL somewhere. Try keyword "12:00-Flasher"

    Frankly I just hope there is someone out there clubbing you monkeys over the head with instructions on how to use a contraceptive.

  • Intel Transition Tougher Than Most May Realize (Score:5, Interesting)

    by krisamico (452786) on Thursday February 02 2006, @06:17PM (#14630787)
    I work on plugins for Adobe's applications occasionally, and let me say that the [apparent] "maybe in 2007" statement from Adobe is not a big surprise to me. The applications in their creative suite and plugin software development kits rely on CodeWarrior, which is [effectively] a dead product. AFAIK, it could never support development of universal binaries, and I would speculate that they have known this for a while.

    Adobe's plugin Software Development Kits (SDKs) are based on C++ object models, which will mean that plugins and their host applications will need to be built with the same tools for everything to work. To move on, I think Adobe is going to have to move all their products and SDKs to XCode (gcc), and though I do not work for Adobe, I would wager that it will be a fairly tough job. IMO, Q2 or Q3 2007 seems a fairly realistic goal.

    The problems the Intel transition will pose for both Adobe and the third-party plugin developers will be daunting. Quark and its associates have similar troubles, but I have personally seen some decent progress on the Quark side, though I think NDA prevents me from saying anything specific. Though I have seen little progress from Adobe as yet, I am confident they will deliver.

    Adobe has a lot of work ahead of them, so I would encourage users of Adobe's creative apps to be patient, and realize how much work Adobe has ahead of them and that it involves more than just moving the applications to Intel. SDKs often offer as many if not more challenges than their host applications. I will part with a criticism: Everybody has known that CodeWarrior is dead for a long time. I think Adobe should have started putting more resources into jumping ship right when the writing went on the wall. Now we are all going to have to wait a while because Adobe was so shiftless about getting off the dead branch.

      • The above reply seems to confuse the issues of ABI (which is what I was talking about) and code container format (which your reply seemed to be talking about). When C++ is used for loadable code libraries, getting your tools and interfaces set up right is a little more tricky. Changing the capabilities of the SDK without breaking compatibility is even more tricky. Where I was going to go was that with Objective-C, you do not have the same problem, but I didn't even start because Adobe probably can't do that

    • Mozilla/Firefox: TargetAlert [bolinfest.com].

      CSS3 compliant browser: a[href$=".pdf"]:after {content: "[PDF]"; font-size:smaller} in your user style sheet. Modify as needed for other types of "annoying" links.

    • Quit whining and install one of the plugins that labels non-HTML links for you.

      Or uninstall the Acrobat plug-in from your browser, so the browser will ask you whether you want to open the PDF, download it, or cancel.
    • Better yet, maybe someone could make a browser plugin that automatically adds these warnings based on the file extension within the link.

    • Re:Please Label PDF links! (Score:5, Funny)

      by SpyPlane (733043) on Thursday February 02 2006, @03:54PM (#14629582)
      Did the beginning of the article:

      "According to a pdf on Adobe's website..."

      not give it away? I thought it was quite obvious. But I guess complaining is easier than reading.
    • It's basic web accessibility: any link that goes to something other than another web page -- an email, a video clip, an archive... or a PDF -- should be labeled or should at least be obvious from the text of the link itself. Remeber, Acrobat Reader takes time to load.

      I don't know about you, but when I look at the status bar to see what the link is (and I've gotten to the point where I rarely click on a link without doing that, just in case), I can usually tell if the file is a PDF. Those are the ones that h
    • Ummm from the first line of TFS: "According to a pdf on Adobe's website, t..."
      • Fuck X11 on OS X, it just doesn't cut it. I can't even input Japanese. So much for using the GIMP for anything here (I happen to live in Tokyo).
          • Japanese has admittedly THE most complex writing system in the world. It makes use of TWO syllable "alphabets", Hiragana and Katakana (if you can call them "alphabets" at all) and at least 1945 officiall Kanji (characters from the Chinese writing system, but partly simplified) plus some more in daily use. A good font comes with about 10000 characters plus it also throws arabic numbers and the latin alphabet into the mix.

            Now there is no way to input that using just a keyboard layout, so it is not a matter of

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