Adobe engineer explains delay in Adobe universal binaries

So yeah, Apple just realeased universal pro apps today. That was kinda freaky after reading the last post... now say something about Adobe and maybe we'll all get lucky...

I'm with Wheels on this.

This has very little to do with technical issues, and more with egos. Adobe is a multi-billion dollar company, and has had harsh words for Apple in the past. You can bet they're still sore that Final Cut rendered their Premiere worthless. Factor in the rumours (now somewhat quiet) that Apple was coming out with their Photoshop-killer, and what you get is a stubborn Adobe refusing to play by Apple's rules. They don't want to be Apple's bitch.

Come on. Do you really believe that Adobe was taken by surprise by the Intel transition? Apple will definitely feel the heat on this. Adobe will definitely make a bundle when their Universal Binary version comes out.

Oh, and it's March 24, and I haven't heard a peep about Apple's Pro Apps.

- hobojoe

Derek said:

"All things considered, Apple kept telling every developer to make sure their projects worked in XCode. That was about 3 years ago."

Derek, this is quite possibly the stupidest argument anyone can make. That's like saying "Adobe's been telling everyone to switch from Freehand to Illustrator for like 3 years so it's your fault that you didn't" or "Microsoft's been telling everyone to switch from C++ Builder to Visual Studio for years so it's your fault that you didn't."

Of course competitors are going to tell everyone to use their product over another product. That doesn't mean that you have to or that it makes good business sense to. CodeWarrior is (or was) an excellent product that is in many ways superior to Xcode. Unless Apple's Xcode provided some great benefits over CodeWarrior then there was no great and compelling reason for people to switch. Now people are being forced to switch, not because Xcode is some great product, but because they have no choice.

Of course by your reasoning it's our fault that we chose a superior product over Xcode for so many years.

MegaMe,

Adobe's known about the transition for less than a year like the rest of us. AND Apple wasn't even supposed to ship any Intel-Macs until June 2006. So now it's Adobe's fault that Apple came out with Intel-Macs early and Adobe trusted Apple by making plans based on June 2006 Intel-Macs.

Very good reasoning.

To everyone bitching about the transition: consider that Xcode is still in its infancy as a development environment, being pretty new and all. Although it might seem easy to simply drop Photoshop's few millions lines of code in a Xcode project and hit build, you must remember:

- that the compiler is different, which might introduce problems in building and/or bugs that must be found and worked around.
- that the environment may not offer all the tools that Visual Studio and Metrowerks support, which means the Adobe guys must find a workaround
- that any automated build & test system that was originally though to be used with the other environments must be recreated from scratch
- that you must do all of this in a way that allows you to rebuild both the Win32 and OS X versions of Windows from the same code base (not easy!)
- that any change you do to the code in order to support all of this might need to be replicated on thousands of source files and (potentially!) hundreds of thousands of lines of code, which must be then tested in order to check whether the check broke anything

That's NOT for the faint of heart!

@ Rafe

Um, I use Adobe everyday (I'm a graphic designer). Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator are all open on my computer at once, all day. I almost always get the spinning beachball if it's hanging, rarely seeing the wristwatch.

The Adobe code is too large for Xcode? Maybe they should rewrite it specifically for Xcode then. Yes, it's a Herculean task, but since they're already whining about what a big hassle it's going to be to convert their current code, they can just whine that much more; it'd probably result in leaner code and a better overall product. GASP!

Does Adobe expect us to believe that the PhotoShop code dwarfs the code for programs like Mathematica and Final Cut Pro? Will somebody believe me when I say that the relationship between Apple and Adobe is on the skids?

Adobe and Quark products are severely overpriced. Adobe has its customers by the balls.

On one hand I know that their apps, especially Photoshop, have really old code bases, and I'm sure they have all sorts of custom stuff written for Metrowerks, so I'm sure it is a non trivial task to move over to XCode.

On the other hand, I'm not surprised they aren't going to stop working on Cs3 to patch Cs2. I doubt that their upgrade rates to Cs2 were that great, because there wasn't any real compelling reasons to upgrade. By waiting until Cs3, they are guaranteeing huge upgrade rates because everyone will be on x86 Macs by then.

I believe that the engineering feat is difficult, but I'm betting this decision wasn't made by engineers. Uncool for us, but we created a monopoly (myself included), so we deserve it.

Any software that shows the black wrist watch (from the OS 9 days), and not the rainbow wheel, during processor intensive moments needs to be rewritten to become universal.

Adobe products CONSTANTLY show the black and white wrist watch, in almost any task. Tsk. Tsk.