Scott Byer wrote in his blog the reasoning behind the decision to hold off a Universal Binary release of PS until 2007. So the main problems, he said, were their f’ked-up legacy 68k codes and using CW when they should’ve migrated to Xcode when they were advised to. I believe Apple told developers to do that 5 years ago. Mathematica probably has as many if not more customized assembly routines yet they released 5.2 as a Universal Binary apps back in February. Same thing goes to Apple’s very own Aperture.

Living Photoshop: Macintosh and the Intel switch.

This comment by coreen is right on the money:

So what your saying is that the last transition was the one where you slacked off and gave the customer a second rate set of tools. I am not trying to be mean or anything but it just sounds like you should have been working on eliminating the old 68k code completely so you would not have to rely on emulators and plug-ins. AND if i remeber last time Adobe was one of the last ones out of the gate to go native…or pseudo-native as it were(besides ..the ahem “other company” but at least they got it right the first time). Then during that time you managed to really concentrate of windows version and its performance. If I were your boss… you’d have been fired for lack of forthought in an ever changing business. Adobe has had enough time and resources to be prepared for something like this. Steve admitted to working on intel processors years back in a keynote. I am so glad i never bought CS2. I will stick with CS1 for now i guess. I appreciate your explanation but it really didn’t garner any sympathy. If I misunderstood anything please correct me.

and this one by Andy:

As a professional software developer I have worked on small private and very large commercial projects, using Codewarrior, VS and XCode on multiple platforms. Not keeping your codebase up-to-date and easily switchable from one tool set to another is lack of foresight and planning.

Yes, maybe your codebase is old and complex. Time for a rewrite, buddy. If you don’t do it, your competitors might just overtake you.

Only big companies like Adobe can afford to ignore that and survive. And the users suffer.

And this by Claudio:

Apple herself is aware of the complexity of this port, so the
guidelines suggest to first compile your project as Mach-O in your
actual development tool, and then port the project to Xcode.

Technorati Tags: photoshop, ps, psd