News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 31, 2006

software

Adobe news spookiness

Posted Oct. 31, ’06, 7:11 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Soundbooth John Nack, aka Adobe’s Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, has thrown down on his blog about their Intel only Soundbooth decision.

“The elimination of PowerPC support in Photobooth [sic] raises major issues,” writes Macintouch. I’m a little puzzled: how is it that people can refer to the “elimination” of something that never existed—namely, PPC code in Soundbooth?

Ok, so I’m on board so far for the most part.

Now, if you were Adobe and had started developing a new application at exactly the time when Apple told you, “This other chip architecture is dead to us,” would you rather put your efforts into developing for that platform, or would you focus elsewhere?

I missed that memo. Apple has committed to changing all of its computers to Intel (a goal they’ve met). As I recall though, Apple also committed to years of continued PowerPC development. When exactly did they say “this other chip architecture is dead to us”? I also seem to remember Apple touting this ability to deploy to multiple platforms with ease. I understand part of that is marketing hype, but when did they say abandon ship?

All that said, the decision to go Intel only for Soundbooth does make sense when considering limited development resources. However, they’re still going to miss out on a juicy 90% of Mac users (I’m guesstimating, don’t take me to task, please).

In other, happier news, Adobe is going to use WebKit in Apollo. For those not in the know, Apollo is a tool for developing cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies. Sounds pretty cool. More validation of the rendering engine in Safari hopefully means better support down the line.


3 Comments

spiderbat said:

The funny thing about this is that Adobe's delay in developing an intel-native version of its "creative suite" is holding back many Macintosh users from upgrading to intel based Macs...

October 31, 2006 7:42 AM
Tom said:

From programmer's point of view there is very little difference between developing Cocoa applications for Intel and PowerPC. In most cases, it is just a matter of marking a checkbox in compilation options.

Universal apps developers are to follow simple coding guidelines, while it porting old PowerPC app to Universal may require some effort, writing from scratch requires almost no effort.

Weird...

October 31, 2006 10:04 AM
shadownight said:

You really have to question Adobe's commitment to the Mac. I think this is the first of many apps that'll subtlety drop PPC support.

October 31, 2006 2:45 PM

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