Adobe developer Scott Byer points the finger at Apple as why Adobe will be late with CS3 (the Intel version). After talking about previous shortcut’s Adobe has used to switch Photoshop to PPC, etc. he comes straight to the punch with:
Doing that this time around was just not possible for a variety of reasons. It means is that this time, there’s no limited-cost option for getting most of the performance available on the platform for Photoshop in a short amount of time. In other words, no shortcuts.
Wait a sec, here is the spin:
That leaves doing the work for real – taking the whole application over into XCode and recompiling as a Universal Binary. And that’s no small task. You see, as software has matured so have the development environments we’ve used – Visual Studio and Metrowerks – they’ve adapted to handle the ever-growing applications using them. From having projects with large numbers of files that open quickly, to having compact debugging information, to having stable project formats that are text-merge-able in a source control system. These are things XCode is playing catch-up on. Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well. And switching compilers always involves more work than you would think in a codebase of this size.
So, in short using low-cost shortcuts all these years has finally caught up. Why blame Apple for your lack of foresight?
Now I am in no way a software developer and may be putting my foot in my mouth, but all I can see in his post is a smoke screen.