I’m a Mac developer with MultiAd, makers of Creator , an InDesign competitor in the newspaper industry.

Carbonization is a good thing. It means your code conforms to the modern APIs. I doubt Adobe would *totally* rewrite all of their apps for Cocoa. Cocoa (Objective-C) is a totally different language (and an ugly one at that) than C or C .

Moving from CodeWarrior to Xcode isn’t a huge deal. I got Creator converted in a week. This assumes the app is already being built as a Mach-O app, not a CFM app that might also run in Classic.

In my experience, the biggest hurdle is making changes for i386; finding all the code that relies on data being in big endian byte order and changing it to little endian. This includes file I/O, custom resources, custom Apple Event data, custom clipboard data, bitmap data (rgb, cmyk, etc), ColorSync, bit fields in structs, the list goes on. This is a huge task, and nearly every bit of code should be checked. I’d like to meet the people who invented little endian and slap them about the face for a few hours. It’s illogical and a pain in the butt when debugging.

And Adobe is not one to release software very often at all. Need a bug fixed? Hope you don’t mind waiting a year or two. This news makes me happy at least, because it confirms that we’ll once again beat them to market (we ran natively in OS X way before Adobe and WAAAYYY before Quark).

Professionals need efficient SOLUTIONS to work – hardware alone won’t make it happen – emulated (with Rosetta) software won’t either. You will rather stick to G4 PowerBooks until Adobe and others prepare universal binaries versions of their flagships.
So I say, MacBookPro will be filling up Apple’s storages as a “flashy new thing to put on the table and amaze your friends” for a couple more years before it will be able to work for it’s “4x-faster-than-G4-Ultimate-Solution” name.
The funny part is that by the time the Universal Binaries versions of software come out, MacBookPro from 1Q/06 will be already an “oldie” comparing to other newer solutions avaliable on the market… That’s a one big leap backwards, isn’t it.
Let’s hope that this lesson from “rat race of the Big Ones” will teach Apple to better cooperate with the second part of “Ultimate Proffesional Solution” – software vendors.

BTW. I was thinking of buying MacBookPro, after this Adobe statement and other scarying reviews of Intel based “cookies” I’ve decided to buy the best G4 PowerBook – this way i will stay more efficient with an oldie than the 4x “faster” Intel “dream machine”.

It seems pretty clear what’s going on: Adobe has a ton of legacy code. My guess is the apps are carbon, and they’re still coded in CodeWarrior. Adobe’s press release explicitly says that they have to first port to Xcode before they can create Universal Binaries. And last year’s Stevenote (where he introduced OS X/Intel) said very clearly that developers who weren’t using Xcode would have a much bigger challenge doing the port.

I’m not a developer myself, so I could be speaking out of my a##, but my guess is that this is Adobe’s fault for keeping their apps carbonized for so long, and not doing the dirty work over the last few years to make them more Cocoa- and Xcode-friendly.

Any actual developers out there care to shed light?

I’ll be interested to see the performance comparison between G5 Powermacs and Intel Mac Pros, certainly. I mean, that oft-cited AnandTech article comparing G5s to xeons to opterons basically puts the g5 above intel but below amd. Whether the intels will actually “blow away” the powerpcs is not a sure thing, though Apple will certainly say they do. What remains to be seen is how apple plans to market the top end intel processor as the “ultimate” solution when AMD actually has the edge in the desktop and server processor domains. (There is the possibility that intel will overtake amd, of course, but we should assume the opposite until the revolution cometh…)

that really sucks.

Unfortunately, Apple’s been screwing with Adobe for awhile now by creating competing software (Motion, Aperture) which prompts Adobe to finally serve up a nice little “Screw You” reply with the intel switch.