[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Ric Perrott]

On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 03:44  PM, Paul Russell wrote:

> It's not quite that simple - I can a few issues:
>
> (i) Endianness. PowerPC is big endian, x86 is little endian - lots of 
> additional code will be needed for byte swapping file-based data, etc

You mean like every vendor that ships dual platform software has 
already been doing for years? Adobe, Microsoft, etc etc? The 
Application developers do not have to concern themselves with 
endian-ness unless they are doing some intensive assembler. Cocoa and 
the MacOS API takes care of all this and removes it as a concern.

>
> (ii) AltiVec. I wouldn't mind betting that Quartz and other high 
> performance chunks o' code are optimised for AltiVec, in which case 
> they'll run like molasses on x86 hardware.

Well you don't know that do you? Molasses I think would be pretty 
strong considering that x86 will be pushing 4 GHz by the time OS X is 
ready for public release. And if QuartzEx was written properly from the 
start -- as I'm sure it was -- then the processor specific enhancements 
will be easy to port to another architecture.

>
> (iii) Carbon. Most apps are still only Carbon at best, not Cocoa. It 
> will be years before this balance shifts in Cocoa's favour. Carbon on 
> x86 would be a major enigneering challenge.

I said this already. However Cocoa is the future and most high profile 
OS X apps, Photoshop 7 being the major exception so far, are or will be 
Cocoa based applications. Office v.X, the OS X port of Quark, The next 
rev of Final Cut Pro are all native Cocoa apps.

Like I said, this is at MINIMUM a year or so away, but it will happen.


-------------------------------
Ric Perrott
Writer, Poet, Pot-Stirrer
Visit http://www.ricperrott.com