Mactels: Third Party Apps

javacowboy

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.

brussell

I don't know about any of those, but I use an open source statistics package called R, and there are some early builds of that ready for Intel Macs.



I do remember hearing that Firefox was ported almost immediately. Here. There's also some stuff here.

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.

brussell

Quote:

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.

towel

Quote:

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?