Adobe have known about Cocoa for how long? And somehow this is Apple's fault? I smell rats...

Just one more slap in the face to Apple and its customers by Adobe. The truth is that Adobe should have been working to modernize their code base(s) a long time ago. Instead, they have invested a minimal effort into their Mac product portfolio and have essentially been milking that while investing most of their effort on Windows product development.

I hope that strategy winds up biting them in their arse.

Hopefully Apple has in stealth development a photoshop competitor, and this is the catalyst for its release. Time for Apple put the screws to Adobe and put an end to the suffering.

Oh, and no Flash on the iPhone either. Ever.

Time for Flash to begin its slow and agonizing death, and I hope its painful and costly for Adobe. Apple doesn't need to buy Adobe. They just need to render them irrelevant.

And this is one of the reasons I put Adobe in the same category as Microsoft. I find them to be arrogant and annoying. Adobe reader pop-ups, ongoing Flash issues, Cold Fusion problems, the list goes on and on.

I know someone will come back saying they love Photoshop and Illustrator and make their sites dance and sing with CF. Mark me down as a happy GIMP user and as soon as I get some time I'll be testing alternatives to Dreamweaver/GoLive.

This problem created by Apple -- not Adobe. Dumping Carbon in favor of Cocoa is just one of 4 horrendous changes Apple has made in the last 15 years. Remember the promise of Write-once and Run-both? I believe Mac OS XI may support true Virtualization -- Mac apps and Win apps running side-by-side. The only 'Mac apps' available by then could be Apple's own iApps.

If any Mac (not iPhone) developers plan to ask Apple any hard questions @ June's WWDC -- please don't drink any Cool-Aid first.

As a Mac only user for 28 years, I still wouldn't recommend anything else. As a very minor Apple developer, the Mac has been a huge waste of time!

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iBill wrote:
Just one more slap in the face to Apple and its customers by Adobe. The truth is that Adobe should have been working to modernize their code base(s) a long time ago. Instead, they have invested a minimal effort into their Mac product portfolio and have essentially been milking that while investing most of their effort on Windows product development.

I hope that strategy winds up biting them in their arse.

Hopefully Apple has in stealth development a photoshop competitor, and this is the catalyst for its release. Time for Apple put the screws to Adobe and put an end to the suffering.

Oh, and no Flash on the iPhone either. Ever.

Time for Flash to begin its slow and agonizing death, and I hope its painful and costly for Adobe. Apple doesn't need to buy Adobe. They just need to render them irrelevant.

I have been a Creative Suite user for some time and an early switcher to InDesign. After I upgraded to Leopard I started having problems with InDesign and Acrobat Distiller crashing; Illustrator, PhotoShop and GoLive run with no problems. Well GoLive is as fine as it always has been which is to say it crashes now and then, I don't care for the interface in DreamWeaver.

Anyway a few weeks ago with more than the usual lead time on a job deadline I decided I would give Pages a try and I was pleasantly surprised at the power of the program. It was a 12 page program for a play presented at a local theatre, it contained PhotoShop, PDF, and Illustrator files. There was a little bit of learning curve, but nothing that stumped me. It is not yet an InDesign killer, but it would not take much and the price is right. Note that I delivered PDF/X file to the print shop and not a .pages file, no problems with the file and the finished product looks no different than had I created it using inDesign. The only downside I see is that a PDF coming out of Pages are larger than the seem to be had they come from InDesign, this goes for distilled PS files as well.

Have any of you tried the Extract Shape and Instant Alpha features of Preview? This too getting close to what PhotoShop offers in the way of cutting something out of a background. Preview needs layers and some other PhotoShop features, but Apple is probably quite capable of offering a good image editing program. Preview also offers some PDF editing that in the past would have required the full Acrobat program

What I need from Apple, or some other software publisher, is an alternative to Illustrator.

Also a DreamWeaver/GoLive killer that lets me do coding as well as graphical layout of pages.

Yeah, I think that there is some tension between Apple and Adobe.

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Anonymous wrote:
This problem created by Apple -- not Adobe. Dumping Carbon in favor of Cocoa is just one of 4 horrendous changes Apple has made in the last 15 years. Remember the promise of Write-once and Run-both? I believe Mac OS XI may support true Virtualization -- Mac apps and Win apps running side-by-side. The only 'Mac apps' available by then could be Apple's own iApps.

If any Mac (not iPhone) developers plan to ask Apple any hard questions @ June's WWDC -- please don't drink any Cool-Aid first.

As a Mac only user for 28 years, I still wouldn't recommend anything else. As a very minor Apple developer, the Mac has been a huge waste of time!

Funny, it wasn't a problem for other major developers like Quark, Microsoft (who was late to the game with Office, but did get it done), etc.

The Mac OS (and Macs) has had 64 bit support for quite a while (G5s, C2D, Xeon). Leopard has even more 64 bit support. Windows has 64 bit support for one version of Vista (ie you have to specifically buy 64 bit Windows). Far fewer buy that version than the other versions of Windows.

This was a bad move by Adobe. Maybe they know that Apple is working on something to compete directly.

I've upgraded InDesign and Photoshop religiously since ID v 1.0. This will be the first time I've skipped a rev cycle, and I'm sure my company and printers will be grateful for the break.

Pages is an anemic alternative to ID CS3 (v5.0) and Quark will never get my business again. Likewise, Lineform does not measure up to Illustrator ( I still prefer Freehand). There is no real competitor to Photoshop on the horizon.

When Adobe devoured Macromedia, it was the death of competition in the professional print graphics and web design fields. Perhaps we can hope that Apple or some other company will develop alternatives to the Adobe suite in the long run, but for now, I'll just hang on to my money and not reward Adobe for their lack of support.

There was really no reason for Adobe to convert Photoshop to Cocoa before now. Apple has been neglecting Carbon for quite some time now, but even so, the benefit of converting Photoshop to Cocoa would have been slight. I can't blame Adobe for not converting sooner. I can blame Apple for neglecting Carbon for so long.

But ultimately, I have to blame Adobe for making excuses now instead of getting their butts moving.

Business Opportunity

To get my last century technical degree, I was required to take Economics 101. Anyone else? Virtualization is enabling Windows apps to run on Macs. Intel Mac users will have say 10x the app/game choices on which to spend their S/W budgets. No one (to my knowledge) is working anything to run Mac apps on Intel PC's -- directly or under Windows. The Virtualization ideal is a one way street.

Companies that support both platforms have a great incentive to drag their feet. Soon they'll only have to support one standard on both platforms. E-101. Many big companies had supported both HD-DVD and Blue-Ray until a choice was made.

It's quite possible Intel Mac users will be running Win & Mac apps side-by-side under a new Mac OS version.

Smile!

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Mikuro wrote:
There was really no reason for Adobe to convert Photoshop to Cocoa before now. Apple has been neglecting Carbon for quite some time now, but even so, the benefit of converting Photoshop to Cocoa would have been slight. I can't blame Adobe for not converting sooner. I can blame Apple for neglecting Carbon for so long.

But ultimately, I have to blame Adobe for making excuses now instead of getting their butts moving.

I agree that Apple bears some responsibility for its mixed message regarding Carbon64. However, the fact that Carbon was "neglected" should have been the hint for all developers to get on the Cocoa train if they wanted their products to remain viable in the long-term.

Personally, I can't help but imagine that Apple has already added additional resources to the Aperture team to add 64-bit support and to either beef up its editing tools or to create a separate application which better competes against Photoshop. I think that the developers of TIFFany currently work at Apple and would certainly be an asset for such a project. If this happens, it will be interesting to see whether competition stirs Adobe to step up or if they will initially choose to cede the market to Apple (as they did with Premier).

I don't have the evidence yet but I suspect Apple is largely to blame. First, Apple essentially out of the blue announced its plans to switch to the Intel architecture. Companies like Adobe where well into their development cycle for products by then. Apple told the world it would take almost two full years to convert its whole line to Intel. Then a year later the whole line was made Intel. Meanwhile, Adobe was somehow made out to be the bad guy because it's products weren't ready on Apple's constantly changing time schedule. Second, companies like Adobe were using Codeweaver to write their applications. In order to write Universal applications they had to dump those tools essentially overnight and switch to Apple's far less developed tools.

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Guest wrote:

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Mikuro wrote:
There was really no reason for Adobe to convert Photoshop to Cocoa before now. Apple has been neglecting Carbon for quite some time now, but even so, the benefit of converting Photoshop to Cocoa would have been slight. I can't blame Adobe for not converting sooner. I can blame Apple for neglecting Carbon for so long.

But ultimately, I have to blame Adobe for making excuses now instead of getting their butts moving.

I agree that Apple bears some responsibility for its mixed message regarding Carbon64. However, the fact that Carbon was "neglected" should have been the hint for all developers to get on the Cocoa train if they wanted their products to remain viable in the long-term.

Personally, I can't help but imagine that Apple has already added additional resources to the Aperture team to add 64-bit support and to either beef up its editing tools or to create a separate application which better competes against Photoshop. I think that the developers of TIFFany currently work at Apple and would certainly be an asset for such a project. If this happens, it will be interesting to see whether competition stirs Adobe to step up or if they will initially choose to cede the market to Apple (as they did with Premier).

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Guest wrote:
Pages is an anemic alternative to ID CS3 (v5.0) ...

Lessee, Pages costs $80--WITH Keynote and Numbers, while InDesign, by itself, costs $700-800--9 to 10 times as much, or, if one divides the cost of iWork by 3, 27 to 30 times as much. One would hope that InDesign is a bit more powerful than Pages, but **30 times** as powerful?

I guess with Today turning out so awesome on other fronts (BSG premieres today!), something sucky had to happen for Balance.

Seriously, #@!$ Adobe. That is coming from a Photoshop user who has been working with it for decades too. As others have noted, hopefully Apple is creating a Photoshop competitor (Darkroom?), and thats the reason for this move.

Can't come soon enough if you ask me.

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DaiMac wrote:
I guess with Today turning out so awesome on other fronts (BSG premieres today!), something sucky had to happen for Balance.

Seriously, #@!$ Adobe. That is coming from a Photoshop user who has been working with it for decades too. As others have noted, hopefully Apple is creating a Photoshop competitor (Darkroom?), and thats the reason for this move.

Can't come soon enough if you ask me.

Could be. Photoshop seems to be used mostly by two professions--graphic designers and photographers. Their needs are actually quite different, I've been told. That's why Adobe created Lightroom and Apple built Aperture, I expect. Photoshop is just too complicated and too slow for most professional photographers' workflow. They need software that can process large numbers of images quickly, making basic manipulations (e.g., white balance/color correction, cropping), cataloging them and allowing the photographer to review and choose which ones to work on further. I'm not as familiar with graphic designers, but, even when they work with photos, they are usually working with large images/files and spending a bit of time on each one.

There are other options for photographers, including the iCorrect series by PictoColor and Lightcrafts' Lightzone. They do some things better and faster than Photoshop, as they don't try to do everything Photoshop does. (Check out the Relight function of Lightzone, for example. Doing that in Photoshop would take quite a while.)