Photoshop for OS X

MolGOLD writes: "Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop, which will feature native OS X support. Now that Photoshop 7 will run natively under OS X, will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

Big day for Apple

[ciryon]

I pretty sure they'll sell quite some more OS X packages now. I know many people have been waiting to upgrade from 9.x and Photoshop has been the main reason.

Ciryon

NO

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been said a hundred times. The problem you'd encounter when porting an application from OS X to *ix is that OS X apps use Cocoa, which doesn't exist for your fave open source OS. Some years ago Photoshop (3.0) was ported to Irix using a MacOS->motif toolkin. It sucked ass. You won't see any OS X app running on *ix/X anytime soon.

to clear up some misconceptions

[Hadlock]

just b/c it's ported to os x, doesn't mean you can automatically port it to linux, or any other variant. photoshop 7 will be run on top of aqua, which in turn runs on top of darwin, among other things. apple has a great explination on their http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/ [apple.com] os x site. in neat aquazied-graphics even.

porting photoshop 7 to linux/KDE/ect would be about as easy as porting age of empires w/o wine. did i miss anything? i hope that clears up alot of porting questions

More in-depth view at MacCentral

[JimRay]

MacCentral [macworld.com] is running a much more in-depth article [macworld.com], complete with screenshots you can actually see. Also included are a hands-on review and some intelligent commentary missing from the very PC-centric C|Net.

Macromedia & OSX

[Brento]

will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

I bet you'll see a press release from Macromedia soon, but that'll be it for a while. They're behind schedule releasing Dreamweaver 5 and Ultradev 5, which is rumored to support dot-Net, and they've gotten to the point where they're just putting out open-ended Microsoft-style vaporware press releases [macromedia.com] instead.

Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX, but of course, that's just my betting. Then again, maybe this is the reason DW/UD5 is so behind schedule - maybe they're trying to release everything at once, including native OSX support and dot-Net authoring. I'm getting to the point where I wouldn't accept anything less when this thing finally comes out.

Re:Big day for Apple

[KarmaPolice]

I pretty sure they'll sell quite some more OS X packages now. I know many people have been waiting to upgrade from 9.x and Photoshop has been the main reason.
Why would that be? OS X can run MacOS 9.x programs as well as MacOS 9.x - it just loads the classic inviroment like OS/2 loaded the windows 3.x program manager to run windows software. It's a bit slow to start but otherwise it works like a charm...

Re:Why hurry?

[Beetjebrak]

Adobe's market is HUGE in the apple section, the Wintel market for their products pales in comparison. Practically every publishing shop in the world runs on Apple hardware using Adobe and Quark apps. So yes they're in a hurry. It's their biggest market.

Re:NO

[legis]

> The problem you'd encounter when porting an application from OS X to *ix is that OS X apps use Cocoa,
> which doesn't exist for your fave open source OS.

I disagree, it should be easy once the GUI-kit of GNUstep is complete which should be later on this year.

Re:porting with gnustep

[legis]

> I am pretty sure GNUStep is WAY out of date with Cocoa. I don't think it would be an easy task to update it either.

No, GNUstep actually follows the Cocoa API very closely. One of its goals is easy porting of Cocoa and GNUstep apps.

It screams ...

[d0n quix0te]

It is bloody fast on OS X. Beats the hell out of OS 9 as far as speed is concerned. And of course it toasts the XP version by a large margin. Expect Steve to do a OS 9/ OS X/ XP bake-off at MacWorld Tokyo.

Looks like the threading model and the new disk drivers have made a huge difference.. And of course better memory management

Here's a snippet from another BB.

Anyhow, I recently had made available to me a 'future copy' of PS running on X natively. The 'carbon' version that comes after 6.0. I have been using PS 6 on XP and thought things were slower so i did some testing. If you are interested in the results, here they are:

The systems:

The Mac-
OSX 10.1.3
PowerMac G4 'Sawtooth' 533 Dual Proc.
768MB PC133, 40GB DiamondMax 7200rpm
nVidia GF2 MX w/32mb

The PC
Win XP
Athlon XP 1800+
512MB 266DDR, 40GB DiamondMax 7200rpm
GF3 Ti200 w/64MB DDR
(the GF3 is overclocked and runs @ Ti500 speeds)

Photoshop tests

MacAddict actions and 15mb Steve Jobs.tiff from the 03/98 Mag cd

results:

Beige G3/266: 2min 48sec (reference from Mag)

PS 6.0 -- Win XP: 36.5 seconds
PS 6.0 -- Classic 9.2.2 24.5 seconds
PS 7.0b -- OSX 10.1.3 12.5 seconds

I am gonna be running more items in other programs, but i could not believe the result and the difference.

....

This isn't scientific test, of course. FWIW

Not quite

[stux]

having played with PS betas, I'm pretty confident in saying that Adobe Photoshop 7 for OSX is a Carbon application.

All this means is that its linked to the Carbonlib (think share library)

rather than the Cocoa frameworks.

They're both native, its just that Cocoa apps get more features for free from the OS, which means they implement more of the standard OSX features.

Carbon apps can implement just as many of those features... but tend not to because it takes a lot of work to implement them (for instance, BBEdit supports the Services menu)

Photoshop will probably implement a lot of the Cocoa features even though its a Carbon app, simply because Adobe has the resources to do this (Just like Microsoft)

Another serious difference is that Cocoa can only currently be targetted via Objective C (ObjC++ too), Java and AppleScript (this is another major reason to use Carbon for Photoshop.

And thats about it.

Re:Big day for Apple

[marmoset]

No, you are wrong.

The equivalent in the PC world was the shift to the Win32 API (debuted (really) in Windows 95) from 16-bit apps, which happened in 1995. The equivalent shift in the mac world is OSX with the Carbon and Cocoa API's, in 2001. What application running under Windows 3.1 are people still running without upgrading -- I'd like to know!

Re:Eh Eh, you cant

[moof1138]

You cannot "run" them directly from the Terminal, but there are a few tricks that you can use to control them from the Terminal a little less directly. As was mentioned above you can use the 'open' command to launch a GUI app. Beyond that if the app is scriptable to do what you want you can use 'osascript' and its brethren to execute AppleScript commands for the command line (making it possible to use shell/Perl scripts to automate functions of GUI apps). 'apropos osa' will find you all the relevant commands, which have man pages. Photoshop in the past was very scriptable, so as long as they have maintained this, you should be able to write shell and perl scripts that take advantage of this, or fire off oneliners in the shell. Since you are using a shell command to execute an applescript it might be a little more complicated in a oneliner than just selecting something from a menu or clicking a button or two. But automating a task in a script could be more worthwhile since you can perform repetitive tasks.

Pantone

[paugq]

Pantone is one of the things Gimp will NEVER have. Pantone is a patented technology and requires the Gimp community to pay them $$$ if they want to implement it.

Re:Someone tell me...

[marmoset]

So if I were to consider Photoshop, what would it give me over Gimp?

1. Live CMYK editing (essential for real-world print publishing)

2. Font handling well beyond anything available within XFree86

3. Tight integration with tools like Illustrator (e.g. being able to specify vector masks using Illustrator's sophisticated Bezier tools and use them directly in Photoshop) and inDesign.

4. Peerless Postscript/PDF integration (i.e. produce Postscript that will actually rip on a professional imagesetter and produce usable output on the first try, instead of wasting hundreds/thousands of bucks on trial and error while your client stands around angrily looking at their watch)

5. Best of breed built-in algorithms for things like scaling, color correction, etc.

6. Polish.

I've used the Gimp, and I'm impressed by what it can do, but in a past life I also worked in a graphic arts shop, and I cannot stress enough the importance of some of the above items (particularly 1 and 4) in real-world paying applications.

If all you're doing is touching up vacation snaps, then Photoshop's big pricetag probably isn't worth it to you, but if you're trying to make a living pushing pixels, no other app comes close, and the Gimp (as cool as it is) isn't even in the ballpark.

What about TIFFany

[skribble]

Caffine Software [caffeinesoft.com] sells TIFFany which very well could be every bit as good as Photoshop. This is actually a cocoa app that was originally designed for OpenStep. On the plus side it's very powerful and very different. On the minus side it's pretty expensive (They really should offer a $149 competitive upgrade from Photoshop!) and it's very different.

Anyway... I'll probably end up with Photoshop (I've been using it since Version 2.5). But there are options for OS X. (And I'm sorry, but GIMP is not an option for professional photo editing... It's a step above most graphics software, but it's not Photoshop or TIFFany. (I actually think people who use and like GIMP on OS X should really download TIFFany3 Trial, I think they'll be pleasantly supprised).

Re:NO (Carbon API on Unix)

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a post on the [e-mail] m,ailinglist about such a project not long ago. I think he was going to call it "Graphite".

Re:Big day for Apple

[arhra]

No, it is more akin to the shift from the old DOS/9x codebase to the NT kernel. It's just that MS managed the transition better, since they provided an API (win32) that ran on both, and didn't confuse the situation with another API that ran only on the NT kernel. Apple could have had a similar transition using Carbon, which runs on both OS9 and OSX, if they'd planned ahead better, rather than fscking about with the whole Copland ("hm, no, maybe not, it's crap and we aren't getting anywhere..."), Rhapsody ("yes! a decent OS that actually WORKS! What do you mean people don't want to rewrite everything from scratch to target a new API that has precisely nothing in common with the old one?"), OSX ("OK, we'll clean up the old Mac Toolbox API, and port it to OSX, so you can target both the old OSes and the new one at the same time. We'll just not actually finalize the spec for the new api until after we've released the first version of the new OS!!"). If they'd come up with Carbon when they first bought Next, they could have rolled carbonlib out with OS9 (or maybe even 8.5 maybe? i'm not sure of the timeline), and got most apps targeting it relatively easily. Then when OSX was released, they could have had Photoshop et al running natively right from the start.

Re:Big day for Apple

[ciryon]

No, Windows XP is not very compatible with older Win apps. It has happened so many times now I seriously consider installing Windows 98 instead, for those crucial apps I really need. Or perhaps one would buy a VMWare licence so I can run them without rebooting from Linux. :-P

Ciryon

Re:Macromedia & OSX

[JasonOrrill]

Not to disrespect Mac folks, but I bet the profit involved in putting out Ultradev 5 with dot-Net authoring will result in a lot more sales than Dreamweaver in native OSX

That may be true, but they've also got to worry about the potential of lost sales. At the moment I'm using Dreamweaver 3 in Classic mode, which works fine but as more and more apps run native it becomes increasingly painful to have to do that. If GoLive is native before Dreamweaver, I may well consider switching.

As a side note, it's not just OS X support that is lacking. Full OS X support still isn't here yet. I just upgraded to Freehand 10 and have been dismayed to learn that pressure-sensitivity for my Wacom tablet isn't supported yet with it. So it's back to Freehand 9 in Classic for that, or look to Illustrator, which I hear does support it.

Re:wonderful...

[nycdewd]

as the poster remarked in his reply to you, previous to mine here, Aqua and Quartz are two different animals...

Mousing? ha! MouseZoom, freeware. Great.

Do not confuse yourself by assuming that i am conceding the mouse action in OS X is not up to snuff, it is. But Mousezoom is for freaks like myself who want ridiculous mouse speeds, and don't care to spend any time cooking up their own solutions when they could be doing something more important like using their comps to pay the rent or posting at /.

heh.

just another reason to appreciate OS X, there are so many people making great little apps and tweaks for it...

"lest we forget, the world is so much more than black and white, there are infinite shades of grey" (attribution: me)

Macromedia and OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit off-topic, but it was mentioned in the original post... I've heard from an insider that Macromedia will be releasing the next version of Flash in about a month, possibly shortly after Macworld Tokyo. Of course, there are numerous tweaks, but it appears the main draws are that it will be Mac OS X native and scripting will be heavily improved. And it won't be called Flash 6, but rather Flash MX.

Flash and Fireworks are in late beta

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that aren't aware, both Flash MX and Fireworks MX are looming large on the horizon. Some of the rumore sites have it right, as I have them myself. :)

Re:Big day for Apple

[TotallyUseless]

but.... the old photshop is still compatible... it runs in the Classic compatability layer, and quite well I might add. If you are so inclined, you could keep running the classic version of photoshop, presumably forever. How is that a lack of compatability? The problem with photoshop wasn't that people couldn't run the old one, it was that they wanted the native version. No on HAS to buy this new version of photoshop, as you seem to imply. Same with Office and countless other apps. If people are happy running them OS9 style then more power to them

Re:photoshop??

[pressman]

Well, basic CMYK support would be useful. A history palette, non-destructive layer effects, vector text and layers, basic knockout features. Well, hell, there's a lot that Photoshop can do that the GIMP can't. Plus, PS has a very well thought out and useful interface.

The GIMP is a pretty decent application and you can't beat the price, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a standard part of a professional graphic artist's tool box.

Re:Why hurry?

[Anonymous Coward]

A large portion of this is Acrobat (not Reader, full app) to government agencies and bundleware with PC scanners.

Re:weird idea maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

So really, the issue is porting the in-house GUI framework. And from my experiences with porting stuff to OS X, they're probably either using carbon or cocoa, both of which are proprietary Apple APIs.

Actually, the Cocoa source is closed and proprietary but the API is open to the extent where you can freely implement your own version of it. This is where GNUStep comes from.

Re:Don't forget Dmitry Skylarov

[pressman]

Linux is doing that, learn to program and use your expertise as a graphic artist to make gimp be like that

I want to spend my productive time creating compelling graphics and UI designs that meet and exceed the needs of my clients.

Man, I'm a graphic artist because I don't ever want to be a programmer. I appreciate the hard work and creativity of programmers because they give me the tools I need to do my job efficiently and effectively.

For me, Adobe and Apple understand my needs as a graphic artist. The free software movement does not seem to be very interested in my needs as a graphic artist and is more interested in the needs of a radically different demographic, read programmers and network admins. That's fine, but don't try and tell me that I should become a programmer of OSS software just so I can use open source tools. Adobe, Apple and Macromedia meet my needs more than adequately.

Re: digital camera anyone?

[chrsbrwn]

dude, you are so misinformed (or you're trolling, in which case you are misinforming others):

1. Photoshop upgrades are only $150. They usually have at least 1 or 2 significant new features that make the upgrade worth buying (like 5.5->6 added a full vector type engine). Plus, when I was doing photo retouching for a living, $150 was the target price for a single small retouching/restoration job (about 1 1/2 hours of work).
2. Some people aren't satisfied/can't work with a point-and-shoot camera. A decent, professional level digital camera, that works with existing pro lens systems is way more than $600... the Nikon D1x [imaging-resource.com] is over $5000. If you don't need the flexibility of a full digital system, but still want the flexibility of interchangeable lenses, it is still cheaper to buy an N90 or N100, some decent lenses, and a film scanner (total of around $1500-2000).
3. Plus, while cameras like the D1x are able to rival some 35mm film stocks in quality, they aren't even close to the quality of a 2-1/4 or 8x10 transparency.

So, basically what I am saying is that there are still a lot of people scanning from transparencies, and that some really good retouching tools (plus being able to deal with large files) are worth the price of Photoshop.

If all you ever have to deal with are teeny RGB images targeted to the web, by all means, use the GIMP... it'll get the job done. But if you ever have a need to edit a 75Mb CMYK image (a 2 page 8/-1/2x11 full bleed spread at 150 line screen), and you'll get fired (or not get another contract from the same people) if the color is off or if there is a huge scratch right through the middle of the model's face, then $150 for a Photoshop upgrade, or even $600 for the full version of Photoshop, starts to look quite reasonable.

Re:Why did it take so long?

[MacOSXHead]

This is just my guess as a long time Mac developer. It is likely that Photoshop contained lots of 68k assembly code that had to be rewritten for PPC. Photoshop was written back when you had to squeeze every bit of processing power out of the Mac. While this could work on Mac OS 9 and earlier (Mac OS 9 has a great 68k emulator), this needed to be changed for OS X.

You are wrong about the APIs. The vast majority of APIs still exist in Carbon. It is true there are preferred APIs (e.g Event Handling) that are new. The old APIs are at least 80% intact and native to OS X. This is the whole purpose to Carbon.

Adopting the new event model and porting 68k assembly code would have taken some time in an application as complex as Photoshop.

Re:What about TIFFany

[freshmkr]

A quick note for those of you with old NeXT boxes or NEXTSTEP/OpenStep on your PC or workstation: it looks like Caffeine is offering licenses for the older version of TIFFany for free. Check out http://www.caffeinesoft.com/pricing.htm [caffeinesoft.com] (scroll down to the bottom third of the page).

--Tom

Re:Big day for Apple

[overunderunderdone]

Apple is absolutely a software company. iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, iPhoto, AppleWorks...

Apple's a 60/40 hardware-software company, I'd say.

In terms of money its more like 91/9 hardware-software (At least for this last quarter - $114 Million software revenue; $1.261 Billion hardware revenue) In terms of effort you may be right but that 40% effot in software is done to drive that 90% in hardware revenue.

Most of the software is given away for free with a hardware purchase. Even the software they sell is part of a strategy to sell hardware. Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, etc are intended to be "Killer Apps" that drive hardware sales in a particular niche market. The 9% of revenues is just a nice bonus. The only software that doesn't fit this bill (though it used to) is Filemaker, which for that reason is not part of Apple but was spun off as a subsidiary.