Odds are you're not in Miami right now partying at Photoshop World 2006. At least you can listen to the conference keynote on the March 22 episode of the Inside Mac Radio podcast [iTMS link]. This is not your vanilla brand, ultra-serious conference keynote. It includes goofy skits by The Photoshop Guys, stars of the popular Photoshop TV podcast [iTMS link], and a sneak peek at an unreleased beta build (build 3) of Adobe Lightroom, Adobe's answer to Aperture. If you're into Photoshop and you've never been to Photoshop World, it's worth listening to--if for no other reason than to see what all the fuss is about.

Adobe Photoshop Product Manager John Nack had this to say about the Universal Binary status of Adobe applications in an interview with Inside Mac Radio at Flash Forward 2006 this week. As you've probably heard, with the exception of the public beta of Adobe Lightroom, Adobe apps are not yet Universal. You can read more excerpts from the interview at The Unofficial Photoshop Weblog, or listen to the interview on the March 2, 2006 episode of Inside Mac Radio [ iTMS link ].

Nack:
"We recognize that to really address the way the market's been changing around digital photography it wasn't going to be good enough to just keep doing incremental additions to our existing code. What we really need is to start with a fresh slate. So in the case of Lightroom, because they did that, it's been a lot quicker for them to move to Mactel.

With some of the more mature apps, like Photoshop, Illustrator, it's a really big project, and there's a lot of work to move the code from Code Warrior over into Xcode, get that compiling, and then get that compiling on Mactel. So it's something where it's a long process. I wish we could do it faster. But Apple's been really great in supporting that. There've been Apple folks on site all the time over at Adobe answering questions, bouncing ideas back and forth. . . Both companies really want to see this happen, just like users do. We'll have it out as soon as we can, with the obvious qualifier that we want to right. We don't want to just rush it out there and have it not work well. So it'll take some time, but we're definitely working closely on it.

As we work with Apple we want to make sure that our applications keep evolving and taking really good advantage of all the new innovations they've got. They came out with the dual processor, dual core G5's. They're making some really great changes around the graphics architecture, like with the new MacBook--much faster memory systems with their GPU. And so I think that this evolution will help us stay really current and take good advantage of that. And of course every time a new system comes out one of the key benchmarks is how fast does it run Photoshop. And so it's in everybody's interest to make sure that our apps really shine on the new boxes."