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No 64bit for Photoshop CS4 on OS X
- Thread starter sosumi1981
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The trouble is that is Adobe is right and it really does take one million line of code to make PS CS3 then we can apply industry cost modles to see what it would cost Apple to develop a "PS Killer". For mature code that is well tested, mostly bug free and documented a rough estimate (based on 1E6 LOC) is 333 man years. Assume the devolpers make 80K/year and a very low estimate of overhead costs at only 100% of salery and we have $160K times 333. or $53 million dollars. Not really a lot. I'd assume most managers would add some "pad" to my estimate because Apple would be doing something new to them and breaking new ground. I would not be surprized if the real number were closer to double.
And then what about the schedule? Will you put one engineer on the job and wait 333 years for him to finish or will you hire 1,000 and try to get it done in a few months. Neither will work. It took adobe a decade to get this far and I except this was the "correct" pace for them to work at. Two or three years to totally unrealistic, I'd say Apple would need 6 to 8 years to pull it off. PS CS3 is comparable to Final Cut Pro. How long did it take Apple to write FCP?
Bottom line is that it would NOT be cost effective to try and compete with Adobe. Adobe certianly wold not have to re-write every one of those million lines and their staff is already up to speed in the subject area and they have a well proven overall design. I think this means at least a 4 to 1 cost advantage over Apple if both started today to write a coca version of PS CS3. And I'm saying "at least"
A good starting place to estimate cost of software deveolment is the "cocomo model". It is has been around for years and is good once the project get to the point where you have staff sized larger than 50 or 100 engineers so statisitics can work.
See here for more info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO
11 Years and counting
Adobe has had since 1997 when Carbon was released to start porting to Cocoa.
Eat it, Adobe. You either expect to lose massively in your quarterly reports or will change your tune.
Apple is no longer beholden to either Microsoft or Adobe to sustain growth.
Adobe has had since 1997 when Carbon was released to start porting to Cocoa.
Eat it, Adobe. You either expect to lose massively in your quarterly reports or will change your tune.
Apple is no longer beholden to either Microsoft or Adobe to sustain growth.
Cool, thanks for the link. I wouldn't think they could pull it off in two or three years either. The cool part is, they don't really have to set out at the start as a "Photoshop Killer." It can start with things like PDF support, photo editing capabilities, plugin support (all here now in the OS, iPhoto, Aperture). They can chip away in stages at both functionality and market share.
1,000,000 lines over 10 years(-ish). They had to change
1 line approx. every 5 minutes 15 seconds.
You do realize that many of Apple's apps are in Carbon and are unlikely to go 64-bit anytime soon too?
arn
You simply have no idea of the massive level of functionality
Photoshop offers. Apple would need to employ a small country
to make a Photoshop-killer.
Did you even read the thread? Up until last June, apple was TELLING devs that carbon would handle 64 bit apps. Apple changed their mind at that point and put many many apps behind schedule for 64 bit.
And speaking of "terminal lethargy", isn't apple suffering from it even worse since they still haven't converted most of their apps to cocoa? I just don't get the hypocrisy of calling adobe "lazy" when Apple themselves have done no better (worse in the case of Aperture vs Lightroom).
Apple had been developing an intel version from the start, they spent much more time on it than just from when it was first announced.
And apple still hasn't updated the vast majority of their apps, why not? They've had even MORE time than Adobe, right?
Considering hardly anyone else is shipping 64 bit apps? Including Apple? Seems to make apple look way more stupid than adobe.
Early enough for what? Before June 2007, Apple was telling devs that they could do 64 bit apps using carbon. No, I'd say 10 months ago wasn't early enough. And unless you have something to back up your claim that apple has a PS killer, could you stop spouting that pointless nonsense?
If you're going to call me an idiot, at least clarify what gave you the idea that Apple already has a PS killer. What's your source, or is it just speculation you pulled out of your ass?
First of all, Adobe really needs to clean up Photoshop. It's too bloated of an app to run efficiently on existing machines and requires the latest and greatest.
Secondly, Adobe being forced to clean up their code base for the Mac is exactly what they needed to do in able to keep up for the future.
Secondly, Adobe being forced to clean up their code base for the Mac is exactly what they needed to do in able to keep up for the future.
You are assuming nothing has been done. Apple's answer to Photoshop is already waiting in the wings. This is the opportunity they need to bring it out.
No offence but I think you are being far too generous towards Adobe here and being overly conservative in regards your estimates.
Adobe's code is real crap and the porting to Cocoa will indeed take them a long long time, but starting over fresh using Cocoa can be remarkably fast. Witness Pixelmator. I know a lot of folks are going on about how Pixelmator has not got close to the wide PhotoShop feature set, but for most users all the basic stuff is already there, already Cocoa, and it only took two guys a very short time to do it. You also have to figure in all the bloat that is in PhotoShop and CS suite (hundreds of gigabytes of absolutely unnecessary garbage), and realise that all *that* stuff doesn't actually have to be ported.
I think Adobe has completely "lost it's way" in terms of knowing what to do, what will sell, what it's customers actually want, and even who it's customers are.
It's painfully obvious that this is the case and that it's a company-wide problem. No company with those kind of problems will ever produce anything noteworthy, and my prediction is that others will step up to the plate in the interim.
If you're going to keep repeating this garbage, could you at least provide your source? Or did you come up with this gem on your own?
See Virgil-TB2's post. If two guys can do it, what makes you think Apple isn't working on something of it's own? Most of Photoshop exists already in OS X. Apple could easily release something to compete. Do you really think they have no back-up plan just in case Adobe ever decided to pull Photoshop completely? Pretty naive. All the signs are there. Let's just see what happens.
CS3 will tide me over just fine
Shaving 10-12% off my blinding fast Mac (or rather, failing to ADD 10-12%... until CS5) won't kill me. I survived Rosetta, this is nothing
I'll just save money by skipping CS4--which I likely would have done anyway, making this non-news for me. I like the "every other" upgrade plan.
I don't blame Adobe or Apple. Change happens--in this case OS X happened--and sometimes that change is well worth it.
Adobe had to go with what looked safest--NOT go Cocoa until they had to. Fair enoughL it's a huge task.
And Apple intended to deliver 64-bit Carbon but then it didn't look practical after all. Apple wasn't lying or keeping secrets, they changed their mind for reasons which we may or may not ever know, but which may have had technical merit. The OS 9 to OS X transition was NOT some little thing.
It's fun to decide on a "bad guy" and rant, but I won't rush to blindly throw blame at either party, and I won't lose sleep over CS4. I don't think I've processed 37 GIGApixels of image data in my LIFE
As for Apple having a backup plan in the works--that would make sense, since Photoshop serves such an important function and the risk of losing it for whatever reason is worth a backup plan. That said, I'll believe it when I see it, and won't be in any hurry to abandon Photoshop. It would be cool if Pshop were to gain some competition, though!
Shaving 10-12% off my blinding fast Mac (or rather, failing to ADD 10-12%... until CS5) won't kill me. I survived Rosetta, this is nothing
I'll just save money by skipping CS4--which I likely would have done anyway, making this non-news for me. I like the "every other" upgrade plan.
I don't blame Adobe or Apple. Change happens--in this case OS X happened--and sometimes that change is well worth it.
Adobe had to go with what looked safest--NOT go Cocoa until they had to. Fair enoughL it's a huge task.
And Apple intended to deliver 64-bit Carbon but then it didn't look practical after all. Apple wasn't lying or keeping secrets, they changed their mind for reasons which we may or may not ever know, but which may have had technical merit. The OS 9 to OS X transition was NOT some little thing.
It's fun to decide on a "bad guy" and rant, but I won't rush to blindly throw blame at either party, and I won't lose sleep over CS4. I don't think I've processed 37 GIGApixels of image data in my LIFE
As for Apple having a backup plan in the works--that would make sense, since Photoshop serves such an important function and the risk of losing it for whatever reason is worth a backup plan. That said, I'll believe it when I see it, and won't be in any hurry to abandon Photoshop. It would be cool if Pshop were to gain some competition, though!
So you pulled it out of your ass.
You think apple could do it "easily" (if it's so easy, why haven't they updated simpler apps like Aperture to 64 bit yet?), therefore they MUST have done it already, and it must be coming out soon.
Thanks for the clarification.
I run CS on an old PB and it works fine. I do some photo work but much more visual work to aid in the compositions of my art. What aspect of PS is too bloated? I ask, not to be confrontational but because for the decade that I have used PS I have really enjoyed the depth and forgiving nature of the program.
Okay, I'll bite. What program is currently being developed that will match the ease of using PS? When do you expect it to be released? Will it have a history palette and layers?
No offence but I think you are being far too generous towards Adobe here and being overly conservative in regards your estimates.
Adobe's code is real crap and the porting to Cocoa will indeed take them a long long time, but starting over fresh using Cocoa can be remarkably fast. Witness Pixelmator. I know a lot of folks are going on about how Pixelmator has not got close to the wide PhotoShop feature set, but for most users all the basic stuff is already there, already Cocoa, and it only took two guys a very short time to do it. You also have to figure in all the bloat that is in PhotoShop and CS suite (hundreds of gigabytes of absolutely unnecessary garbage), and realise that all *that* stuff doesn't actually have to be ported.
I think Adobe has completely "lost it's way" in terms of knowing what to do, what will sell, what it's customers actually want, and even who it's customers are.
It's painfully obvious that this is the case and that it's a company-wide problem. No company with those kind of problems will ever produce anything noteworthy, and my prediction is that others will step up to the plate in the interim.
Again, I ask this using CS and not using either CS2 or CS3, but what is it you dislike so much when using PS? It seems that you must have had some terrible experience with the program to write this critique. How did PS lose its way for you? What are you not getting out the program that you wish you were? What do you wish was left out so that it would be less bloated?
I'm almost starting to doubt my love of the program that has served me so well all these years from your posts and others.
This is such a non-issue that people have just kept blowing up more and more and more on here until now it is the size of a giant hot air balloon sized mess.
#1- Apple will not make a "Photoshop-Killer". There is too much of an installed base and it has had 20 years of programming history to get to where it is now. That is like saying that Adobe should make an "OS X-Killer".
#2- 32-bit CS4 apps on the Mac is a NON ISSUE. The largest PSD I have ever worked on in my 15 years of heavy PS use was a 1.3 GB file for a billboard. My Mac with 4GB of Ram and a good sized Scratch Disk handled it just fine. Pho-tog's and others, even using a 12.8MP SLR, don't need to crunch or retouch a file that is bigger than 2GB. A 64-bit version will not shine until file sizes or tasks, like filters, have become so incredibly outlandish that your computer screams and cries when you try to do something.
#3- How can people honestly say right now that PS CS4 is not going to have any new features or features worth the upgrade charge? The only person that would have that kind of info outside of Adobe would be Scott Kelby or Bert Monroy. Granted, my take on CS4 is that Illustrator has the most ground that could be gained but I would never close the door on Photoshop pulling a rabbit out of its hat and wowing us. The one feature I really want PS CS4 to include is editable/live preview Lens Flares. That right there would get me to buy the upgrade. Which leads me to....
#4- If you can't see the value in upgrading your CS3 to CS4, then DON'T! If you don't think that there is a value in learning and understanding the new features that each application incorporates, then you probably aren't the core professional graphic designers that Adobe caters to. In my field I have to the best that I can be. I have to be better than the guy at the Mac next to me. How do I do that? I learn every little aspect of the latest application that I can along with the tips and tricks that can either save me time in my work and/or give me the ability to produce something that my client didn't think was possible before.
#1- Apple will not make a "Photoshop-Killer". There is too much of an installed base and it has had 20 years of programming history to get to where it is now. That is like saying that Adobe should make an "OS X-Killer".
#2- 32-bit CS4 apps on the Mac is a NON ISSUE. The largest PSD I have ever worked on in my 15 years of heavy PS use was a 1.3 GB file for a billboard. My Mac with 4GB of Ram and a good sized Scratch Disk handled it just fine. Pho-tog's and others, even using a 12.8MP SLR, don't need to crunch or retouch a file that is bigger than 2GB. A 64-bit version will not shine until file sizes or tasks, like filters, have become so incredibly outlandish that your computer screams and cries when you try to do something.
#3- How can people honestly say right now that PS CS4 is not going to have any new features or features worth the upgrade charge? The only person that would have that kind of info outside of Adobe would be Scott Kelby or Bert Monroy. Granted, my take on CS4 is that Illustrator has the most ground that could be gained but I would never close the door on Photoshop pulling a rabbit out of its hat and wowing us. The one feature I really want PS CS4 to include is editable/live preview Lens Flares. That right there would get me to buy the upgrade. Which leads me to....
#4- If you can't see the value in upgrading your CS3 to CS4, then DON'T! If you don't think that there is a value in learning and understanding the new features that each application incorporates, then you probably aren't the core professional graphic designers that Adobe caters to. In my field I have to the best that I can be. I have to be better than the guy at the Mac next to me. How do I do that? I learn every little aspect of the latest application that I can along with the tips and tricks that can either save me time in my work and/or give me the ability to produce something that my client didn't think was possible before.
Exactly. Only a small portion of the code needs to be rewritten.
For some things, Cocoa is irrelevant. Do you really need a 64 bit Finder? The things where it matters have already been converted.
Or when Apple released OS X.
Exactly. If the code is properly written, only a small amount needs to be rewritten. And with the capabilities built into OSX, chances are that much of that code could be eliminated entirely.
I doubt that buying Adobe would make sense. The price would be immense - and they'd probably have to rewrite a major portion of the code anyway. For a tiny fraction of the cost of buying Adobe, they could introduce a competitive (or superior) product.
Why? For example, why should TextEdit be 64 bits? Apple has moved the stuff that matters.
Furthermore, we don't know what has been going on behind the scenes. No one outside of Apple knows how hard Apple has been pushing Adobe to drop Carbon (or, alternatively, how much Apple has reassured Adobe that Carbon would be 64 bit). We also don't know the reason for the change. Perhaps Apple found that it had a drastic impact on the performance of the system and had to change. Or maybe they simply changed their minds. Without knowing that, it's hard to know how much to blame Apple.
But it HAS been known for 10 years that Carbon is eventually going away and Cocoa is replacing it, so Adobe clearly had plenty of warning.
I agree! Adobe products is what made me make the switch to mac! Two versions is ridiculous. Thats like 4 year gap considering the product cycles of CS.
I wish Adobe would make their own computers!
Great. Just what we need - they'd be selling 400 MHz 486 computers with the Adobe logo for $4,995.
That, of course, assumes that ALL the code needs to be changed (which is clearly false). It also assumes that Adobe has only one Mac programmer (which might be true given the speed that they've adopted Apple's technologies over the past decade).
No offence but I think you are being far too generous towards Adobe here and being overly conservative in regards your estimates.
Adobe's code is real crap and the porting to Cocoa will indeed take them a long long time, but starting over fresh using Cocoa can be remarkably fast. Witness Pixelmator. I know a lot of folks are going on about how Pixelmator has not got close to the wide PhotoShop feature set, but for most users all the basic stuff is already there, already Cocoa, and it only took two guys a very short time to do it. You also have to figure in all the bloat that is in PhotoShop and CS suite (hundreds of gigabytes of absolutely unnecessary garbage), and realise that all *that* stuff doesn't actually have to be ported.
I think Adobe has completely "lost it's way" in terms of knowing what to do, what will sell, what it's customers actually want, and even who it's customers are.
It's painfully obvious that this is the case and that it's a company-wide problem. No company with those kind of problems will ever produce anything noteworthy, and my prediction is that others will step up to the plate in the interim.
All true. However, it's also important to remember that there isn't a single group of Photoshop customers so the job is even easier. You don't need to have 100% of Photoshop's capabilities to get a significant percentage of Photoshop users. Presumably, someone will come out with something with, let's say, 30% of Photoshop's features - that will satisfy 80% of their cusotmers - and gradually increase the number of features over time.
No, do you see difference between operating system and Adobe CS?, also it's only 1 000 000 lines of code to change from carbon to cocoa (they say). Apple managed to offer PPC version of OS X while working on Intel version. That's to different CPU architectures and Adobe just has to cut the crap with carbon and move to cocoa and they had plenty of time to do so.
Just like their market share will never grow again. Just like they would never move to Intel. Just like they won't release a video iPod. Just like apps for the iPhone will be web only with no SDK....
AMEN!!! I can't even tell you how many times my selection tool starts blinking and won't work right so I have to restart the program. Not to mention LITERALLY 75% of Adobe updates crash or freeze and go soooooo slow! SOO FREAKING ANNOYING!!! I really don't like Adobe much!
Many shops that migrate from Carbon to Cocoa will have to deal with a learning curve for the developers.
Objective-C is syntactically very much different from the other modern programming languages. It is most similar to Smalltalk, and Smalltalk isn't exactly in widespread use these days.
It is a shame that Apple's flagship language has to be so different from the other languages in common use today. I've found that I can move fairly easily between Java, C# and C++. Objective-C is a different beast though and completely proprietary to OS X at this point. Of course I understand how this happened... Apple got it when they bought NeXT.
I saw a comment from someone here the other day that was really insightful. He/she was making the comment that Microsoft's approach to .NET was pretty brilliant, in that the different languages they offer are basically dialects and you can pick which one you are comfortable with and still get to the same endpoint.
All that being said, I admire Apple's efforts to keep things lean and clean. But at the same time- why aren't all Apple's apps already 64-bit Cocoa?
Objective-C is syntactically very much different from the other modern programming languages. It is most similar to Smalltalk, and Smalltalk isn't exactly in widespread use these days.
It is a shame that Apple's flagship language has to be so different from the other languages in common use today. I've found that I can move fairly easily between Java, C# and C++. Objective-C is a different beast though and completely proprietary to OS X at this point. Of course I understand how this happened... Apple got it when they bought NeXT.
I saw a comment from someone here the other day that was really insightful. He/she was making the comment that Microsoft's approach to .NET was pretty brilliant, in that the different languages they offer are basically dialects and you can pick which one you are comfortable with and still get to the same endpoint.
All that being said, I admire Apple's efforts to keep things lean and clean. But at the same time- why aren't all Apple's apps already 64-bit Cocoa?
What I have always loved about PS is that one could use it as you do, learning every aspect of the program and being a PS "Master", or one could sit down and learn on a need to know basis. I have continued to learn PS this way since 1999, with trial, not so much error, and sharing info back and forth with other friends.