“What does 64-bit computing mean, practically speaking? In a nutshell, it lets an application address very large amounts of memory–specifically, more than 4 gigabytes,” John Nack, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop, writes on his blog John Nack on Adobe.
Nack writes, “It’s also important to say what 64-bit doesn’t mean. It doesn’t make applications somehow run twice as fast. As Photoshop architect Scott Byer writes, “64-bit applications don’t magically get faster access to memory, or any of the other key things that would help most applications perform better.” In our testing, when an app isn’t using a large data set (one that would otherwise require memory swapping), the speedup due to running in 64-bit mode is around 8-12%.”
Nack writes, “What’s Adobe doing with Photoshop? In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only.”
MacDailyNews Note: Related articles:
Apple does 64-bit right, Microsoft… not so much – August 03, 2007
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is 64-bit done right, unlike Microsoft’s Windows Vista kludge – August 14, 2006
Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger operating system is a true 64-bit environment – April 21, 2005
Nack writes, “The development is frankly bittersweet for us: On the one hand we’re delighted to be breaking new ground with Photoshop, and when processing very large files on a suitably equipped machine, Photoshop x64 realizes some big performance gains… On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and it’s a drag that the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver. We will get there, but not in CS4. (Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we’ll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.)”
Nack writes, “On the Mac Photoshop (like the rest of the Creative Suite, not to mention applications like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and iTunes) relies on Apple’s Carbon technology. Apple’s OS team was busy enabling a 64-bit version of Carbon, a prerequisite for letting Carbon-based apps run 64-bit-native.”
Nack writes, “At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & 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 (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that 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.”
Nack writes, “Now let me be very clear about something: It’s entirely Apple’s call about what’s best for the Mac OS and how to spend their engineering cycles. Like any development team, they have finite resources & need to spend them judiciously. They’ve decided that Carbon 64 doesn’t belong on their roadmap, and we respect their decision. It’s up to Adobe to adapt to the new plan.”
Nack writes, “As soon as we got the news in June, we began adjusting our product development plans. No one has ever ported an application the size of Photoshop from Carbon to Cocoa (as I mentioned earlier, after 9 years as an Apple product Final Cut Pro remains Carbon-based), so we’re dealing with unknown territory. We began training our engineers to rewrite code in Objective C (instead of C++), and they began prototyping select areas to get a better view of the overall effort.”
“In short, Adobe has been taking prompt, pragmatic steps to enable 64-bit Photoshop as quickly as possible on both Mac and Windows. It’s a great feature, not a magic bullet, and we’re delivering the functionality as quickly as each platform permits,” Nack writes.
More in Nack’s full blog post here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple CEO Steve Jobs has repeatedly told developers at multiple WWDC events for years now that the future of Mac OS X development is Xcode. Adobe was told to move to Cocoa years ago. They didn’t. Hence the massive delay in getting native Photoshop and other apps for Intel-powered Macs.
For years now, ever since the Adobe prefers PCs over Macs incident, we have believed that Adobe isn’t as attentive to Mac users as they should be. This latest escapade has not helped to change our minds.
Okay, so let’s play along with Nack and pretend for a moment that having/not having Adobe’s Flash on Apple’s mobile WiFi Multi-Touch platform (iPhone/iPod touch) has absolutely nothing at all to do with this and see what we’re left with: Adobe is late on the Mac, their code is old, they had notice to update long ago, but they only made half-hearted attempts to get their code in shape for the future.
Why is Adobe so far behind on the Mac? Because they thought the Mac was dead. But, they were wrong. Dead wrong.
MacDailyNews Note: MacDailyNews has been using Pixelmator (US$59) exclusively in place of Adobe Photoshop since early December 2007 for online graphics. Obviously, we highly recommend Pixelmator. Pixelmator harnesses the full power of Mac OS X. It takes advantage not only of Core Image, Open GL and Automator, it also supports ColorSync, Spotlight and many other Mac OS X technologies. Pixelmator was built exclusively for Mac OS X using Cocoa — and it shows. Pixelmator supports over 100 different file formats and can easily open and save Photoshop files with layers. Plus, it is “demoware,” so you can try it before you buy. Read more in our article: Pixelmator gives Adobe Photoshop Elements a run for its money – March 10, 2008
I think it’s a good thing that Apple haven’t got this take-over ‘mania’ which seems to infect so many successful companies.
But … couldn’t this be the exception (which proves the rule)?
Apple could make the Adobe shareholders an offer they couldn’t refuse.
@ jtc
The solution to your problem is installing a small high speed scratch disk. I am a heavy Creative Suite user and I found that adding a western digital raptor 10,000 rpm 36gb scratch disk made photoshop and illustrator run way better. I also run 6GB of mem on my Mac Pro.
Hell, I’m perfectly happy that I don’t need to buy CS4 now! CS3 cost a pretty penny and now I will get more use out of it before I have to upgrade again.
I personally feel CS3 runs great… Far better than previous version.
Fark Adobe, at work I suffer through using an HP desktop and the IT boys recently put the latest “Free” viewer. and BY free I mean free to hog every resource the box has, free to crash when printing, free to be utter trash. I will NEVER put an Adobe product on my mac. They suck..
I have had 64bit Vista on a system for about a year now. nVidia driver lockups are quite common. – Strike 1
Companies are not adapting Vista, let alone Vista 64. – Strike 2
64bit XP is quite stable, but will soon be taken off of the shelf. – Strike 3
Apparently the people at Adobe have not been using 64bit Vista for very long. They have not been paying attention to market trends, And they have not paid attention to product announcements. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
@ Take ’em over
Well Adobe is a heavy and old machine wich would cost a big lot of money for what it realy worth.
There are younger, swifter and much more innovative teams around the world to work with.
If anything must be rewriten in Cocoa… let new brains put it together and things will go smoother for Apple.
Thats my guess…
MDN, your take is right on, and when this came up last year, and it seemed to be big news to the developers that Carbon was basically EOL’d, I was completely shocked at what I was hearing.
I knew, and I thought everyone else did as well, that Carbon was not long for this world, and I never imagined that there would be a 64 bit version, even years ago when OS X was new. It never crossed my mind.
But Steve’s announcement last year was evidently Big News to everyone else, and there was quite a big scene about it. It seemed like the news came out of nowhere but they should have bloody known.
{sigh}
Oh well. I only really use Lightroom any more anyhow.
-c
P.S. Oh, and yes, this has absolutely NOTHING to do with Flash on the iPhone. I promise.
I’ve been pissed at Adobe for years. Recently, their support people in India ran me all around. It took 3.5 hours and mulitiple phone calls to get my CS version of Photoshop “authorized”.
The first Adobe support person told me I must update that my software was too old. I asked for his name and I. D. number. He asked “why do you want that”. I told him “so I can tell Adobe in USA the name of the person who said I can’t install the $700 software I paid for”.
Eventually I got authorized. At one time, I maintained licenses to all Adobe software products. Now we’re down to Photoshop only.
I am hoping developers will add effects and text to Aperture. Then I can kiss off Adobe for good.
I had been considering updating to the premium Web bundle, but after the runaround with the India support guys, I decided to rethink the plan. I DON’T NEED TO AUTHOR FLASH!
I am going to be trying out Pixelmator, thanks to this article. $59 for a Photoshop Elements replacement custom made for OS X? That is worth at least a try. Plus, I would like to support these guys.
Adobe is a mud hut. Apple should rain on them or buy them.
I’ve been told that Windows-64 does not run Windows-32 apps natively – one of the reasons Win-64 sells fewer seats than OSX. So … what market are they going for? My guess is this will be their 64-bit Public Beta that the users will be paying full price for. They want to make sure their code is at least “good enough for Windows” before they unload it on the rest of us. I expect we’ll all see an interesting story unfold here – either the Win-64 market will step up to embrace CS4 or Adobe will shift gears and get CS5 ready much earlier than expected.
MDN: yeah, this version was better than the one I passed along.
Dave
Screw Adobe. Elements sucks and I haven’t upgraded beyond CS2. I don’t need 64-bit but I feel for the people that do.
Can anyone verify what Nack says about Final Cut Pro (which, tangentially, I just saw during the end credits was used to edit No Country for Old Men) still being Carbon-based? Is it likely that the pro-est of Apple’s Pro apps is still using what peragrin termed “OS 9 technology” …?
@ Macs King
I feel your pain. I can also tell you that the support situation is getting fixed.
Does anyone know: Does Pixelmator do animation (like ImageReady) as well?
and to think that there have been calls for Apple to buy Adobe for years…
a junk company who doesn’t know what their customer base uses…
Online graphics?! What online graphics? MDN could use Microsoft Paint to create the few puney graphics on this site.
Go Photoshop! And Lightroom! And Flash!
Apple should do a hostile takeover of Adobe. Then kill Flash on all platforms. Then kill Premiere on all platforms. Then kill Photoshop on Windoze platform. That would free up enough resources to get a Mac version of Photoshop written in Cocoa ahead of schedule. Problem solved.
I tried the Pixelmator demo and it was buggy as hell. It does some things in a way that seems counterintuitive to me – or maybe I am just used to the Photoshop way.
Quark went through the same thing. They also thought Apple was dead. They had a commanding lead in DTP, over 90%. When it took them over 3 years to come out with a OS X version, they lost almost 45% in less than 2 years. I’m almost glad this is happening. It will give competitors a leg up and create more competition to Adobe’s Microfoftian tactics.
@DanielP,
“I’m sure no one here would be impressed if Microsoft tried to force everyone to shift to their new Office file format”
Uhhhhh……that is happening. Look in the news.
Adobe sucks.
I’ll never spend another dime of my money on their shiite.
If a developer doesn’t want to fully support a platform, then the writing is on the wall. Excuses given is lie. Since they were given enough time and early notices to move their development tools to properly support the Mac. They didn’t. So kids, Adobe is sleeping with the enemy and that enemy will swallow them, chew them up for all their worth, then spit them out. They’ll come back to Mac users and beg us to buy their crap. No thanks. I hope by then, either Apple develops a better app or does an entire creative suite. Adobe creative suite is a joke. They are milking customers with several versions like Vista.
@marco,
“When my Windoze friends see how quick and easy it is to save & email something as a PDF their jaws drop.”
Mine too. Their only option is to print it out or copy and paste the whole thing onto another document. Sometimes saving as a HTML file doesn’t work because it is a secure site, but, saving as a PDF always works and is easy as hell. I keep all of them in a web receipts folder and then delete them when they are irrelevant any more.
I can understand why they’re so slow, rigor mortis makes moving difficult. It takes a while for the undead to get adjusted.
Frankly, I don’t really care if they get the Mac version out in 64bit at the same time as the Windows version, except in principle. I’d be happy if they’d just fix the numerous bugs in the CS3 suite apps. If I hadn’t paid so much for it, I’d go back to CS2. I mean, what is PSCS3 doing when the beachball spins for several minutes for no apparent reason a few times each day? It makes no sense. I call it a coffee break, but it’s so annoying! And really, could it be that difficult to fix InDesign so that it remembers that I want my default measurement to be inches? Come on! I used to love Adobe, and I want to love Adobe again, but they’re not making it easy.