Right of fair reply: Apple, Adobe, Broomfield

Several days ago, in the finale to a nerds-only discussion that began with a discussion of whether Apple's new "Snow Leopard" used "huge pages" and 64-bit code, I quoted several readers who didn't want their names used. They were objecting to previous comments by someone who had used his name, Ken Broomfield. He reasonably asks for the chance to defend his views. Below and after the jump, his reply, which fundamentally has to do with what he considers lapdog coverage of Apple in the press:

"The bigger point that animates me (and which only applies a little to the Ars article) is that coverage of Apple and a lot of the popular tech press in general is pretty fawning or fluffy. (Have you seen the David Pogue kerfuffle?) It's a bit like the debate over healthcare reform: the details are complicated and the history poorly understood, so people often fall back on tribal affiliations (especially in the Church of Appleology).

"The full story on 64-bit apps is even less complimentary to Apple.

"When Apple first announced 64-bit support in OS X, they said that the old Mac APIs -- the "Carbon" interfaces that programs use to talk to MacOS -- would be fully updated to support 64-bit programs. Photoshop and a lot of other major applications are Carbon-rich, so this was very important. Then late in the day, Apple reversed itself and said Carbon would not be completely updated, creating major headaches for third-party developers. Imagine an editor, a month before deadline, telling you to rewrite large parts of a book in Afrikaans.

"There are two possible reasons Apple changed its mind: the historic shortcomings of Carbon, which are considerable, made it too technically difficult or costly; or Apple was capriciously moving developers to the new, better interfaces, called "Cocoa." Either possibility is embarrassing. Moving complex software like Photoshop to Cocoa is a major, hugely expensive undertaking, because huge swathes of code that run its user-interface will have to be rewritten, tested, etc. And this is happening right after the same engineers (and many others) went through the pain of moving to a very different tool set to support Intel processor-based Macs.

"I have no interest in platform wars -- all OSes suck in particular ways, as you know -- but Windows doesn't confront developers with anything approaching this kind of discontinuity to take advantage of 64-bit processing. The APIs that programs have used since Windows 95 have been seamlessly widened to 64 bits, and in most cases, you can just recompile code without changes. This is why 64-bit Photoshop is out now on Windows, while Macs will have to wait. This is important to high-end photo and film people who use Photoshop and other digital media tools, since they bump their heads on the 4GB limits of 32-bit software. Meanwhile, Apple started hyping 64-bit computing years ago, declaring that OS X was on the leading edge, which, gosh darn it, was kinda true in a sorta Palin-bridge-to-nowhere way.

"Microsoft's programmers, for all their mistakes, designed the Windows APIs to avoid problems in areas like this. The original Mac developers, for all the amazing work they did, architected the original Mac APIs ways that guaranteed many problems. Apple has been very busy jettisoning backward compatibility -- e.g., the MacOS 9 compatibility mode was abandoned on Intel-based Macs, disappointing plenty of people with old software -- and creaking plumbing like this is a major reason. (Virtualization would seem to be the solution to the MacOS 9 problem.)

"Apple's treatment of third party developers (and other faithful) is not always very kind, and in a way it's a testament to the good stuff they create that developers willingly go through the wringer on things like 64-bit support, the move to Intel processors, the move to OS X, the move to PowerPC processors, backward-compatibility problems aplenty, etc."

Ken Broomfield
Wymea Bay
www.irider.com