Mactels: Third Party Apps
I'm considering buying an Intel iMac after the dust settles. However, I'm concerned about running third party apps, especially open source software, almost all of which has not yet been compiled on Mactel yet.
These are some of the apps that I run:
* Firefox
* Thunderbird
* Eclipse
* gVim
* iTerm
* Mplayer
* Adium
* ChitChatX
* DarwinPorts
* NeoOffice
etc...
I imagine most of these apps WILL run on Rosetta, but I'm guessing the vast majority of them will not have binaries compiled on Intel. Some of them may have processor-independent instructions, and others not.
So my question is how long do you think these apps will take to be fully ported to Intel? I'm asking you to speculate, not give me a definitive answer.
These are some of the apps that I run:
* Firefox
* Thunderbird
* Eclipse
* gVim
* iTerm
* Mplayer
* Adium
* ChitChatX
* DarwinPorts
* NeoOffice
etc...
I imagine most of these apps WILL run on Rosetta, but I'm guessing the vast majority of them will not have binaries compiled on Intel. Some of them may have processor-independent instructions, and others not.
So my question is how long do you think these apps will take to be fully ported to Intel? I'm asking you to speculate, not give me a definitive answer.
Comments
I do remember hearing that Firefox was ported almost immediately. Here. There's also some stuff here.
Originally posted by LiquidR
My concern is PhotoShop. Will I be able to run my current version on these new Macs. It doesn't have that Universal designation being that it is an older program. If it can't I'll have wait on upgrading until I can afford to get the PS update and the new Mac.
Steve demoed Photoshop running under Rosetta at his presentation.
Originally posted by JavaCowboy
I imagine most of these apps WILL run on Rosetta, but I'm guessing the vast majority of them will not have binaries compiled on Intel. Some of them may have processor-independent instructions, and others not.
I would actually guess that you'll see the F/OSS stuff ported over very quickly, once developers get Intel Macs to play with. Most of these things are already cross-platform, coded to run on many architectures (including, obviously, x86), and will need only a recompile. And with F/OSS, you don't run into the problem of vendors wanting to hold back the port for the next charge-for release. They'll just appear.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if the various scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, etc.) have been natively compiled for OSX/x86 yet?