Adobe Photoshop CS4: 64-bit for Windows only
Adobe blogger John Nack has let it slip that the next version of Adobe Photoshop (CS4 for those wondering) will be 64-bit… but for Windows only. While I’m usually one to cast blame at Adobe’s feet for decisions like these, I have to admit Adobe is doing the best they can with the situation they’ve been dealt.
Last year at WWDC, during the Mac OS X State of the Union, Apple dropped a pretty significant bomb that didn’t get much attention (probably due to the whole NDA thing, I guess). While Leopard would be a 64-bit OS through and through, Carbon would not gain 64-bit memory addressing. This essentially leaves developers with Carbon apps stuck in 32-bit land, with the only other option being migrate to Cocoa. This was counter to Apple’s promise in August of 2006 that Carbon would be 64-bit.
When I heard this news at the session, I immediately thought that apps like Photoshop, Flash, Office were going to suffer, long term. As Nack points out on his blog, this decision really did throw Adobe a curve ball. They were in the middle of developing against the previous Leopard seed from August of 2006, which did feature a work-in-progress 64-bit Carbon.
So why did Apple pull the plug on 64-bit Carbon? At WWDC 2007, Apple was short on details apart from the obvious, “it was requiring too much work”, and “Cocoa is the future, Carbon is the past”. That’s fine and dandy, but when you’ve already promised this feature 9 months ago, and seeded builds of Leopard with it, you have to admit that pulling it out is going to cause some consternation with developers who have began to use it.
Nack further points out that Adobe is wanting to eventually (CS5?) port Photoshop to Cocoa to gain these (and other) features. Nack isn’t flippant about the challenges that porting to Cocoa will pose. After all, no app the size of Photoshop has ever been ported from Carbon to Cocoa. For reference, even Apple hasn’t ported Final Cut Pro from Carbon to Cocoa, and lord knows that Final Cut Pro could seriously benefit from being 64-bit.
As a Photoshop user, I’m not too disturbed by this. First of all, I’m not pushing massive amounts of pixels, so the speed increase I would see with a 64-bit Photoshop is minimal. Second, and more importantly, I believe the image editing landscape has changed significantly in the last year.
There are now many apps gunning for Photoshop on the Mac. Acorn, Iris, Pixelmator, Naked Light. Most of these apps still don’t come close to offering the vast array of features that Photoshop does. However, all of them are iterating at quite a nice clip (Pixelmator more so than the others), and I believe that within 2-3 years, we’ll have a robust selection of serious challengers to Photoshop, all of which will be significantly lower in price, quicker to market, and from developers more eager to listen to their customers.
I still believe that Apple has a Photoshop like image composition tool in the works. It’s too important a market on the Mac for Apple to not have a contingency plan, in case Adobe decides one day that Photoshop on the Mac just isn’t worth it. Apple has a similiar contingency plan in place with iWork. The differenece is that iWork currently stakes out the low end of the market, ceding the high end to Office. But if Office was pulled by Microsoft, you can bet that the next verison of iWork would quickly rush in to fill the void. Apple has to have the same mindset with Photoshop, as it has learned in the past that Adobe makes decisions about their apps based upon sales and their development efforts. All someone has to do is to look back at Adobe dropping Premiere on the Mac. Within a very short time of that announcement, Apple released Final Cut Express, developed specifically to plug the hole of the canceled Adobe Premiere.
I’m sure Apple’s Photoshop replacement is under development, being held close to the vest so as not to let their opponent know what their strategy is. As to whether Apple will ever release such an app probably depends more on Adobe than Apple. While Photoshop remains on the Mac, Apple has little incentive to do so, as it would surely cause Adobe pause in developing Photoshop for Mac OS X.
Finally, I have to give kudos to John Nack and Adobe for being honest with their customers and up-front about the challenges they are facing. I’ve had issues with Adobe in the past, but in this scenario, they have acted professionally and should be commended for being so open, so early in the development process.
Posted: April 3, 2008 / Category: Blog Watch, Opinion, Software