Count me in among those who are only surprised (or disappointed) at the amount of negativity here. I'm not singling out this one post, but it's a perfect example of the strange attitude going on.
mdntcallr said:
I think Adobe sucks for making their clients like me wait so long.
Yeah, those bastards! Sitting around on their butts and twiddling their thumbs because they wanted to make YOU wait. After all, they merely needed to click on a checkbox and recompile, right? Those jerks are probably reading this and laughing at you! Meanwhile your current machine is totally useless, as it burst into flames and ceased functioning the day the first Intel iMac shipped.
</dripping sarcasm>
Seriously, anyone who's whining about this either has not thought through the situation, or does not understand how large application development works. If it's the latter, I can forgive you -- but only if you read what others are saying and learn from it.
On the first point, look at it this way. May/June 2005, Adobe is happily humming along, just after the release of CS2 for a platform that Apple has given every indication will be stable for years to come. They've weathered the OS X transition storm a few years back and are finally rolling smoothly on the current platform. Things look good for Adobe on the Mac. CS3 development will begin shortly.
Then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, Apple announces that PPC is dead and they are transitioning to Intel. Furthermore, you absolutely
must use Apple's compiler to target the new systems. And the transition will happen quickly. Apple to Adboe: "We know you didn't see this coming, hope you have an army of idle software engineers to throw at the task we've created for you!"
Adobe's response to this should arguably have been "WTF??". Apple did them a huge disservice by not disclosing these plans earlier to one of their biggest developers. Granted, according to the WWDC keynote, Apple hadn't fully made the decision until just weeks before the announcement. But knowing this was a possibility for the last 5 years, they should have made a much bigger deal about migrating to Xcode because it may be the only supported compiler for future versions of Mac OS X, hardware transition or not. Even without a transition decision, Apple should have worked more closely with their large developers to get them off CodeWarrior and onto Xcode starting 2 years ago or more. They could have done this without giving away any hint of an Intel future, and then all the major players would have been ready from day one.
Instead, we come to my second point, which is that it's a
HUGE job to migrate an app the size of CS2/3 from one development environment (CodeWarrior) and compiler to another (Xcode). And no, this has nothing to do with Carbon vs. Cocoa -- one is not better than the other, and both are fine on Intel. Apple dropped a huge bombshell and expected every developer to suddenly halt what they were doing and retool their products to be universal.
Unfortunately you don't just create a new project, load all your source files, and compile. As someone else noted in this thread, there's probably tens of thousands of little issues to deal with in such a migration
without even considering the PPC/Intel differences (which hopefully are covered in the Windows versions of Adobe's core routines). Some person has to make a decision on each and every one of them. Again, this is
HUGE for software of this size.
The announcement from Adobe seems about right on track to me. To complain that
they are the bad guys for taking "so long" is a failure to understand the situation. In my opinion, of course.
