In a total reversal of what Windows and Macintosh users might expect, Adobe Creative Suite 4 will include 64-bit support for the Windows platform, but not for Mac.
According to John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop product manager, Mac OS X users unfortunately won't get 64-bit support until CS5, the next release of the graphics editing software.
Nack attributes this move to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which Nack says took Adobe and other third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has retained Carbon as its foundation.
"At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon," the product manager wrote in a recent blog entry.
"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."
As Nack sees it, 64-bit support in Photoshop will offer the biggest speed advantages for working with massive images on systems with RAM of about 32GB and up. However, normal users could see an 8% to 12% performance increase when using 64-bit versions of Adobe's software compared to 32-bit copies.
Regrettably this means Mac OS X users will not be able to take advantage of the performance gains in CS4; those who do manipulate massive images on their Mac's may need to use Windows until CS5 is released further down the road.
A Note: Ironically, when Photoshop was initially released back in 1988, the software was available for Macintosh only. The product didn't even ship for Microsoft's platform until 1992, when Adobe ported Photoshop 2.0 to Windows.
According to John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop product manager, Mac OS X users unfortunately won't get 64-bit support until CS5, the next release of the graphics editing software.
Nack attributes this move to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which Nack says took Adobe and other third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has retained Carbon as its foundation.
"At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon," the product manager wrote in a recent blog entry.
"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."
As Nack sees it, 64-bit support in Photoshop will offer the biggest speed advantages for working with massive images on systems with RAM of about 32GB and up. However, normal users could see an 8% to 12% performance increase when using 64-bit versions of Adobe's software compared to 32-bit copies.
Regrettably this means Mac OS X users will not be able to take advantage of the performance gains in CS4; those who do manipulate massive images on their Mac's may need to use Windows until CS5 is released further down the road.
A Note: Ironically, when Photoshop was initially released back in 1988, the software was available for Macintosh only. The product didn't even ship for Microsoft's platform until 1992, when Adobe ported Photoshop 2.0 to Windows.
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