A great deal of the two years spent rewriting this software was to get it to
run at all on an Intel chip in a universal space. I cannot begin to tell you
how many times either Apple, MS, or other outside parties just didn't think the
whole 'graphics thing' was worth time or a great deal of effort. Even Apple is
a little iPod-focused and does not dedicate the kind of resources to things
like Photoshop or Illustrator that they thought necessary ten years ago.
Speaking from the standpoint of a person who has to develop training materials
for real-world environments in all relative platforms, Windows never was and
still isn't the big deal it's made out to be. And in the year or more that the
Adobe apps have been in the hands of people just like all of you on these
forums, we've seen a lot of situations where testers -- on their own -- went
out, bought Intel Macs, configured Red Pill (Photoshop before December 15th of
2006) and ran it on both OSs on one machine. They had access to the software in
return for time spent testing this stuff to get it working in the first place
-- engineering teams working on a dozen universal-space apps at one time are
not -- they really aren't -- calculating how much more money Adobe stock will
be worth if they trick everyone into having to buy two copies of their software
instead of one. People do because they have to. This is not, as much as some of
you appear to want to believe -- a conspiracy on the part of a public
corporation.
Adobe's decision to stay within strict -- and considerably different -- OS
requirements did not, in any way, come from them. So blame who you want, but
you really don't have all the information you need to take the 'villagers with
torches' attitude and waste your time and that of the world who deals with
reality the way it is -- by organizing some kind of 'mass rally'. Ain't gonna
work, never did, never will.
Gary Poyssick in Tampa, Florida
gary in Tampa