Adobe: 64-bit Mac Creative Suite apps won't happen till v5.0 - Page 3

Originally Posted by Messiah

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark)....

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

Originally Posted by tink

My mistake I didn't resized Adobe gets paid when they devote resources to something that doesn't ship. I wish my company worked like that.. I've got to look into this more.

My mistake again I guess I was hallucinating when Activity Monitor was showing that Photoshop was using 100% of the 3.5GB of memory I've allotted to it and I was getting scratch disc warnings from Photoshop preventing me from doing a transform action I needed to do even though the scratch disc has 159 GB available. (This is after I closed out of other open Apps that use the scratch disc and my other open PSD docs). I wish I had more then 4 GB on my system because it's painfully obvious that that extra 500Mb I could give to Photoshop would have magically changed my workflow.

My mistake again. I guess my friend who has been a developer since 1981 working for Sun, Microsoft, Apple and Oracle to name a few before starting up his own software company, must have just woke up on the wrong side of the bed when he was bitching about loosing the use of hundreds of thousands of lines of code from something that was indicated it would be supported. But I guess it's ok because of the logic in your first response he just gets paid... I really got to look into that. He's making all this money from code he can't use anymore and makes more money magically by rewriting it even if he doesn't ship a product. That is cool!

ya

Originally Posted by Messiah

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark).

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

Originally Posted by Messiah

The commercial arts market is ripe for a new developer to come in and wipe the floor with the likes of Adobe. Adobe has become lazy, and lazy companies have a habit of falling from favour (just look at Quark).

Either Apple has to start writing it's own commercial arts software, or Adobe has to write its own OS.

Originally Posted by Superbass

What more do you want?

Originally Posted by kim kap sol

You do...if you work as a programmer for a company and you're not getting paid every week or even if the product you work on doesn't ship, I say go work for another company...because you got seriously gypped.

Yeah, hallucinations are bad.

Give names or he doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by Rayz

I have a couple of questions. In fact, they're the same questions that Strobe has been asking.

If Carbon was just meant to be a transition, then why did Apple go to all the trouble of getting a 64-bit released as a beta, before pulling it at the last minute? As far as I can see, up until the WWDC, Adobe was rightly confident that they would have a 64-bit version of Carbon to work with.

The other thing I don't quite get, is why folk are coming down so hard on Adobe for not starting the switch to Cocoa eight years ago, when Apple has not released Cocoa versions of the Finder, iTunes or Final Cut? Why didn't Apple eat its own dog food and start the work eight years ago either?

The important thing is that Adobe is committed to doing the port, and I think that should be applauded, because they could have quite easily have turned around and said 'dual boot.'

And Strobe is right about something else; there are very few applications that share the complexity of Photoshop (or MS Office for that matter) that are written in Cocoa, so Adobe is going to be right out there on the bleeding edge with this development; it will be interesting to see what problems they run into.

Personally, I think that come the WWDC, Apple is going to have a number of announcements that will nail Adobe and MS to the wall, but in the likely event that I'm wrong, I'm going to support Adobe in their efforts to get their stuff onto the Mac, by not bitching about stuff they couldn't possibly have known about.

Originally Posted by Frank777

Yet another opening for a real Photoshop competitor.
But with Macromedia gone and Quark receding, who's going to do it?

CS4 will be out by March '09. Is Pixelmator up to the challenge?

Originally Posted by kpluck

If you want a sample of Adobe's commitment to OS X, just have a look at this thread in their support forums:

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3c06277e

If you read through that thread, you will see that Adobe's stance with CS3 problems in Leopard is that it is basically Apple's fault and they are not going to be doing anything about the issues.

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

Now it's over and Adobe has no longer the leverage it once held.

Apple can thrive without them.

What's worse for Adobe is this little known application that they borrowed many ideas from back starting in 1997:

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

What makes this point relevant is the fact that it's creators shutdown operations of Caffeine Soft to go work for Apple in the Quartz Team, Applications Teams.

If Apple wants to really screw Adobe it can release a new product that can do 90% of what Photoshop does, today, and for a fraction of the price.

Then Apple can open up the plugin-in API and offer a low cost add-on to bury Adobe by duplicating what Photoshop does but works seemlessly within Apple's workflow application suites.

Apple can but will it?

Originally Posted by rain

If a render is going to take 5 min over 4 minutes, no designer cares, we are busy trolling sites like this or off getting a cup of coffee and conversing with co-workers.

Originally Posted by rain

Render time is our 'creative time'... if anything, Hey Adobe... make your crappy apps slower.

Originally Posted by strobe

First of all it isn't always easier to write in Cocoa, especially when you have your own platform neutral interface code in C++.

Originally Posted by Marvin

I still think Adobe's commitment lies very much with Windows users.



I disagree, I think if Apple didn't have Adobe, I certainly wouldn't be using a Mac, nor would any of the designers I work with. I even considered switching over completely when there was no native CS suite for such a long time and I saw that Adobe software generally runs faster on Windows. The rest of the OS put me off so I'm sticking to OS X now but I would put up with the problems on Windows if Adobe software became unusable on OS X.



If they could, it would still be irrelevant. An app that doesn't do as much as Photoshop still won't rival the CS Suite, which has Flash, Dreamweaver, illustrator, Indesign, Fireworks, Photoshop and more.

iweb is nowhere near good enough relative to Dreamweaver
Apple have no vector software and are not likely to get it
Motion is not as good as After Effects by a long way
Pixelmator, Quartz apps etc have a long way to reach Photoshop level especially with the number of plugins

Taking all that into account, IMO Apple *need* Adobe to remain viable in most professional lines of creative work.



Don't I know it and playing your damn hippie/funky/repetitive/out of tune music too loud. All the while us developers try to get the real work done.







Exactly. I wish that Apple hadn't made the distinction at all, though it makes sense in some ways. Just transparently make it so that code works no matter what it is. There was no need to give people an identity to hate in the form of Carbon especially since there is no way they can clearly define what it is to the general public to whom these identities matter.

A Cocoa project can be entirely C/C++ but naturally so can a Carbon one. So if they have the same code then how do they differ? It's just the libraries they are linked to (the stuff from NexT vs the stuff from OS 9) but if the two apps work the same way then there's no difference at all. With most cross-platform code like Photoshop, they'll rely on custom code over system libraries anyway to ensure that OS updates don't break their app and that the feature works the same way on different platforms.

The reason they won't have gotten rid of those old libraries and might never do so is that if an app uses those libraries and has a great deal of code reliant on it, it's not as simple as switching to the Cocoa equivalent as it will do things a different way. In a small app, this is a fairly easy task. In an app with hundreds of millions of lines of code, it isn't easy and it isn't worth it.

People often forget the time frame involved here. OS X is a relatively new platform and it's only been on the market for 8 years. An average developer can code around 1000 lines of useful code a month. A good developer can probably double that so co-ordinating thousands of developers to work on tens of millions of lines of code isn't an easy task.

code-base changes / (developers x 2000 LOC pm) = average development time

Adobe said they changed 60 million LOC for CS3 so:

60 million / (1000 devs * 2000 LOC pm) = 30 months = 2.5 years, which is about how long we waited for CS3.

I reckon that although 64-bit is useful now, it is not of the utmost importance based on the number of people who need it. The number of people with 8GB+ Ram in their Macs will be very small.

What I never understood about Photoshop and generally all creative apps is why they don't have paging systems where only a certain portion of an image is loaded into Ram. Then all they need is various snapshots at different resolutions that would be updated with the changes made to a portion. Photoshop and other apps already do this to an extent but they still load the entire file. You can speed up Photoshop's image loading by reducing these levels from about 8 I think default to 1 in the performance section.

For example, say you have a 10000x10000 image and it's a picture of a person and you need to touch up the face. Why load that image entirely? Simply create a snapshot that is the size of the display resolution. Then allow people to pick an area to work on and it will load another snapshot of the face at screen resolution (this would not be recompressed). Computers are fast enough that this process should be dynamic and you should in theory be able to work on infinite resolution images with as little as 1 GB Ram. The only part that would strain is creating the snapshots but OS X can make thumbnails of folders of 2000x2000 images in real-time.

It would still struggle if you were editing 20%+ of the image at a time but for high resolution images, people would be working on smaller details. It would also still struggle on copy/paste buffers and file saving but for a good deal of uses, it should speed things up considerably.

Indesign would only load 3 pages at full resolution at a time and you'd just see snapshots at any other scale.

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

Here's a thought: Pick an application to make Cocoa ready by the time CS 4 is released.

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer

People don't necessarily need to buy an entire application suite.

Here's a second thought: Don't stiff your customers on price for a single application and/or on being ineligible for future upgrades to applications suites.

Originally Posted by Marvin

I disagree, I think if Apple didn't have Adobe, I certainly wouldn't be using a Mac, nor would any of the designers I work with. I even considered switching over completely when there was no native CS suite for such a long time and I saw that Adobe software generally runs faster on Windows. The rest of the OS put me off so I'm sticking to OS X now but I would put up with the problems on Windows if Adobe software became unusable on OS X.

Taking all that into account, IMO Apple *need* Adobe to remain viable in most professional lines of creative work.

People often forget the time frame involved here. OS X is a relatively new platform and it's only been on the market for 8 years. An average developer can code around 1000 lines of useful code a month. A good developer can probably double that so co-ordinating thousands of developers to work on tens of millions of lines of code isn't an easy task.

code-base changes / (developers x 2000 LOC pm) = average development time

Adobe said they changed 60 million LOC for CS3 so:

60 million / (1000 devs * 2000 LOC pm) = 30 months = 2.5 years, which is about how long we waited for CS3.

Originally Posted by vinea

I think by the time CS4 ships VMWare will have worked out all the issues with running 64bit Vista cleanly with CS4. Then you can allocated quite a bit of memory and processing capability to the application.

Originally Posted by vinea

I would be mildly surprised if Adobe spent 2500 person years just to update CS3 on the Mac platform. Eh, it's possible, Adobe IS a big company making a lot of money but the level of effort to update/port is typically much lower than to write it in the first place.

Originally Posted by Marvin

They might not be able to do that though because each app has to interact with the other apps. Adobe have a huge set of common code libraries that sit inside the /Library folder.



Yeah it's pretty annoying but then a lot of the companies do this. Not everyone needs all the parts of the Office suite, same with the Final Cut Studio but they come as packs.

I much prefer the buying model of separate packages but I could see how it would be easier development-wise to do bundles as it's easier to deal with version compatibility.

Originally Posted by suhail

Wow Pixelmator is nice! Add Curves, Color Modes, Path tool, and Slices and it will become a very serious contender to Adobe's Photoshop.

Originally Posted by hypoluxa

PixelMator should be bought by Apple and beefed WAAY up. It is great on my G5, and its programed in Cocoa and uses Core techs as well, the filters run basically in real time as you adjust their settings. It is a awesome little app. Everyone should check it out!