I think they’re going to get it. Killer apps makes or breaks any platform. With Github, I think the Git hub just scored one. Rails is going to be hosted there for the launch. Capistrano, Prototype, and Scriptaculous already moved there.
I hope so. Git is great. It can speak Subversion, so that’s not a problem, but I don’t want to have to install and learn all the other DVCSs.
The April issue of ATPM is out:
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 the end, both Apple and Adobe chose not to mitigate their risks with expensive long-term projects. Adobe believed its investment in Carbon would be protected. Just as Apple created Carbon in the first place to help Adobe, so too would it stand by its friend by bringing the framework into the 64-bit era. And Apple, for its part, continued to believe that its gentle persuasion would eventually bring Adobe around to the Cocoa side of the fence. For all the bad blood and unfortunate consequences, it’s somewhat heartening to realize that the two companies’ faith in each other so thoroughly informed their decisions.
The uncomfortable truth is that the fastest way to run Photoshop CS4 on a Mac will be to run it under Windows. It’ll be particularly interesting to see benchmarks comparing 64-bit Photoshop on Mac OS X using VMware or Parallels against the native 32-bit Mac version.
Anyway, for a high-profile, award-winning app from one of the biggest software companies out there, the out-of-the-box experience for the new Elements is crappy. Really, it’s the worst I’ve seen in ages. So I had to write this post to complain about it, of course. And it got longer than I expected it to. And rantier.
I had a similar reaction when installing it yesterday. Chris Turner says it took more than 24 minutes to install it. I plan to do as much work as possible in Acorn and use Photoshop only when necessary, e.g. to convert images into small PNG or JPEG files.
Ars Technica reports that Apple’s iTunes store is now the largest seller of music in the US. I think I know how Pauline Kael felt in 1972.
