Adobe CS4 64-bit - Not for Mac? Part 1

In a complete very surprising move, Adobe CS4 includes 64-bit support for the Windows XP and Vista platform, but not for Mac.

According to Adobe's Photoshop product manager, John Nack, Mac OS X users won't get 64-bit support until the next release of the graphics editing software, CS5.

Nack attributes this move to the decision Apple made last year to stop development of 64-bit support for Carbon, a move which Nack says took Adobe and other third-party developers by surprise. Adobe did make CS3 Intel-compatible, but has retained Carbon as its foundation.

Nack wrote, in a recent blog entry, "At the WWDC show last June, [Adobe and] other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa [instead of] Carbon".

"We'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."