Adobe spends ten minutes bitch-slapping Apple over Cocoa, wah wah wahs self into looking stupid
Good grief. Adobe’s unleashed a ten-minute moan about Apple (YouTube), blaming Apple for having the audacity to not sit in the 1990s and continue driving its company into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing— (That’s enough of that — Ed)
The video starts in innocent enough fashion, saying how fab it is to credit Adobe’s programmers on the Photoshop splash screen. Then, approximately all of Adobe’s programmers spend most of their screen-time bitching about Apple.
Russell Williams:
At the WWDC, Apple announced that they were not going to do a 64-bit version of Carbon. Carbon is the programming environment on the Mac. They introduced this other framework, called Cocoa.
Yeah, that Cocoa API that was introduced in 2007 at WWDC, and not, in fact, at the very beginning of Mac OS X (based in part on frameworks from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep). Man, there’s no way Adobe could have realised that was the direction Apple was headed in, apart from Apple having said that from the beginning and stating that Carbon was really a ‘bridge’ for temporary backwards compatibility.
John Penn II:
They yanked the carpet out from under the entire industry at that conference.
Aside, you know, from Apple having said for the previous six years or so that developers should be moving applications to Cocoa. In reality, then, Apple yanked the carpet out from people who’d been going “LALALALALA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU” for over half a decade.
Really, the entire whine-fest is summed up best by Seetharaman Narayanan:
It is not practical to rewrite Photoshop.
In other words, the application had 20 years of built-up crud that needed sorting, streamlining and rewriting. It pretty much sums up too much of Adobe these days. Instead of innovating, it adds crap on top of crap. Instead of working with operating systems, it fights against them. And on the sheer horror of a rewrite: given the choice, it’d presumably still be churning out a PowerPC version for the Mac and running it under Rosetta (and then saying Apple “pulled the carpet out from under the entire industry” when the Rosettaless Lion yomped on in).
Every 18 months, I keep hoping the Adobe of old will return, the one that was full of fire and creativity. I keep hoping that Photoshop in particular will be streamlined and Mac-like on the Mac and Windows-like on Windows. But it’s like watching that great band you loved in the 1980s; you always check out the new album, but you only need to listen to the first couple of tracks to get that sinking feeling and realise you can never go back.
Hat tip: Peter Cohen
Adobe has simply taken up residence in an alternate reality, where reality is what they want it to be. So if Apple says that Carbon is a stopgap tech to ease the transition to Cocoa, in Adobe’s reality, Carbon becomes “THE programming environment on the Mac”. Similarly, Adobe are happily looking forward to a future in which Flash is available on 99.7% of tablets sold, as it is on the desktop, as soon as Android deals with the pesky problem of the iPad.
> apart from Apple having said that from the
> beginning and stating that Carbon was really
> a ‘bridge’ for temporary backwards compatibility
That’s quite a bit of revisionism. Apple clearly stated that Carbon was fully supported, and would remain so. Even as late as at the Leopard WWDC, they plainly said that there would be a 64-bit version of Carbon.
To prove how important Carbon was to them, Apple built the freaking Finder on it.
It’s no wonder that they went so far to please companies like Adobe and Microsoft. After all, at that point, Apple *needed* their support, and so, did everything they could to get them to port Office and Photoshop to Mac OS X.
If Apple still relied as much on Adobe as it did even a few years ago, we’d have a 64-bit version of Carbon right now. So let’s not pretend that abandoning Carbon was somehow the plan all along.
I think it was pretty clear Carbon was all about legacy support. That some of Apple’s own applications used it isn’t really relevant. To not realise that Apple would eventually (and, likely, abruptly) dump Carbon is a bit like thinking PPC support would be around forever.
However, what annoyed me most about the video, other than its inherently whiney nature, was the suggestion Apple killed 64-bit Carbon and introduced Cocoa at the same time, which “yanked the carpet out from under the entire industry”. From under industry giants hoping to eke out more years from legacy coding, perhaps, but even Microsoft didn’t kick up this kind of stink.
> I think it was pretty clear Carbon was all
> about legacy support.
That’s a different point. Yes, Carbon was created to allow people to easily port Mac apps to Mac OS X.
> That some of Apple’s own applications
> used it isn’t really relevant.
Of course it’s relevant. Apple did this to show how important Carbon was to them. “See, we’re using it for something as fundamental as the Finder, so you can feel safe using it in your app, too.”
> To not realise that Apple would eventually
> (and, likely, abruptly) dump Carbon is a
> bit like thinking PPC support would be
> around forever
I don’t see how this comparison makes sense. What do you mean by “PPC support”?
> However, what annoyed me most about the
> video, other than its inherently whiney
> nature, was the suggestion Apple killed
> 64-bit Carbon and introduced Cocoa at the
> same time, which “yanked the carpet out
> from under the entire industry”.
I agree, that’s just BS.
I always got the impression from Apple that Finder was Carbon because Finder was a big rewrite of a stodgy old app that needed more resources than Apple was ever willing to give to it.
On PPC, I’m talking about Rosetta being dumped in Lion. Therefore, unless I’m hugely mistaken, any PPC apps aren’t going to work on that OS. Some devs/applications (albeit very few) have yet to move to universal binaries.
I don’t understand your point about the Finder. The Mac OS X Finder was a rewrite anyways. It’s not a port of the OS 9 Finder. It would have been easier for Apple to do it in Cocoa (and I’m pretty sure early versions of OS X, perhaps even the developer preview version, had versions of the Finder written in Cocoa).
The PPC comparison still doesn’t make sense to me. Rosetta is a user feature. It’s there to allow people to continue running their old apps for a while. Apple never told anyone that it was okay to continue making PPC apps just because Rosetta exists. Carbon, on the other hand, is a developer API. Apple actually told developers to use Carbon for new versions of their apps.