[G4] G5 and photoshop

[Jeremy Kezer]

Kunga,

>Mr. Jobs and a developer demonstrated porting 32-bit applications to 
>64-bit in a matter of minutes during his historic June 23rd 
>SteveNote. It is from that presentation that I derived the idea that 
>it is easy and quick to port applications to 64-bitness. Is that not 
>what he told us? If you can't remember that part of the address, I 
>will be happy to look it up and quote what was said. I have the 
>whole thing on my hard drive.

Since you have no experience developing software, it would behoove 
you to stick to subjects you know.

First off, nearly all commercial software products on the Mac are 
developed using CodeWarrior.  Moving from CodeWarrior to 
ProjectBuilder/Xcode is not trivial.  For C++ development, 
ProjectBuilder is slow and more convoluted to use than CodeWarrior. 
Xcode is better, but it's pre-1.0, crashes a lot, and is still slower 
than CodeWarrior (who just upped the ante with CW Pro 9).  Sure, the 
distributed compilation feature can make it faster, but you need a 
whole rack of XServes to accomplish this.

Secondly, CodeWarrior does not support the G5 or 64-bit (and these 
are SEPARATE) optimizations, so developers using CodeWarrior will 
have to wait until Metrowerks can add the support.

Thirdly, taking an app developed in ProjectBuilder and recompiling it 
in Xcode and running it on the G5 is trivial.  Optimizing it for 
64-bit requires a lot of work if the app wasn't designed to handle 
64-bit memory addresses (and any application of any size will have at 
least some code that will have to be reworked).

Fourthly, the demo was of a small Cocoa app.  All major software 
packages are written in C++, not Cocoa.  Cocoa is NOT cross-platform, 
and any software company worth their salt isn't going to develop 
their product for only 5% of the personal computer market, no matter 
how much they like the Mac.

Lastly, G5 optimizations, just like G4 Velocity Engine optimizations, 
are not automatic.  You'll need to sample your app to determine where 
you're spending your processing time, and then BY HAND optimize that 
region for the G4 or G5.  You can realize great performance gains by 
doing this, but it takes time and effort.

I was at the developer conference and saw the keynote, and Steve's 
"Reality Distortion Field" was set to 11.  The rest of the conference 
(and there are lots of reports online if one wants to read up more) 
was devoted to finding out what one can realistically expect from the 
new machines and developer tools.  Remember, even Panther isn't going 
to be a 64-bit OS.  Apple has had more time than anybody else in the 
world to get ready for the G5.  The new machines are great, but it 
will take developers - even Apple - time to rewrite software to take 
full advantage of them.

Kunga, you're smart enough to question something if it sounds too 
good to be true.  It usually is.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Kezer

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jeremy at kezer.net                              http://www.kezer.net/
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