Why Adobe Hasn’t Gone UB Yet
One of Adobe’s employees, Scott Byer, maintains an Adobe blog named Living Photoshop. Yesterday he discussed some of the reasons why there will not be any current versions of Adobe software released or patched to be a Universal Binary to run natively and therefore faster on Intel Macs. Scott brings up some good points that I had not thought about before, such as the fact that they use development environments that are more advanced than Apple’s Xcode currently is. To get the application to be a UB, it has to be run through and compiled in Xcode with a number of flags set to get it in the right format to work on Mactels.
That leaves doing the work for real - taking the whole application over into XCode and recompiling as a Universal Binary. And that’s no small task. You see, as software has matured so have the development environments we’ve used - Visual Studio and Metrowerks - they’ve adapted to handle the ever-growing applications using them. From having projects with large numbers of files that open quickly, to having compact debugging information, to having stable project formats that are text-merge-able in a source control system. These are things XCode is playing catch-up on. Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well.
While I really wish I had a UB’d Adobe Creative Suite 2 to tinker around with, I would rather Adobe concentrate on the next version at hand rather than go back and waste time with the older CS2. However, it seems like there will be a good wait until CS3 is released; somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-18 months I’ve heard.
Not having been able to test it out myself, I can’t say for sure- But from what I’ve heard Photoshop and Illustrator don’t run too, too slow through Rosetta (though I wouldn’t go trying any HDR work). Sucks for people who edit video in Premier though, as I can’t imagine it being able to keep up, and Final Cut licenses don’t come cheap.
Not trying to sound harsh, but that time estimate can’t be right. Adobe Knows that if they wait a year to a year and a half to release any product that will run on the new Mactels, they risk losing a HUGE user base. A lof more people may use Windows, but just about all of their creative user base are Mac owners. True, less than 50% percent will have moved over to a Mactel as most will opt to wait for more stable versions of the machines to become available before purchasing, but that portion that will switch are most assuredly early adopters that happen to work in the various creative fields.
This means that Adobe will have to do something soon - like in the next 6-8 months soon. And not just producing the CS2 stuff, I’m talking the whole shebang: After Effects, Premier and the Studio 8 stuff. They’re already slipping by not having a version of the Flex Builder 2.0 app for Mac users to test. Something this big could seriously hurt all that they have worked for in the last year with the merger and all. Especially, if Apple’s software division keeps gunning for them with better produced versions of Aperture and maybe even a pro-version of their iWeb app. I’m starting to lose faith in this merger more and more everyday.
Plus, Adobe has had plenty of time to work on these apps. I think they just got caught with their pants down when Apple announced the new Mactels in January. They probably hadn’t planned on starting to work on the new versions until April, which would have only been a few short months before Steve was originally slated to announce the machines (June). Everyone else started working on their UB apps back in June 2005 when Steve announced the move. That’s not to take away with the fact that the CS apps are huge, massive undertakings, but seriously we should be seeing CS 2.5 released in April or May. I am not pleased……