Chris L Peterson wrote in message . ..

My friend says primary development is performed on Windows platforms, and then
ported. Frankly, I find it much more likely that the software is developed on
one platform - any platform- than that is developed independently on two. I
don't find the comments relayed by Davoud compelling, but I've no problem if you
do.

Your friend didn't paint you a complete picture of the development
process at Adobe. They moved to Metrowerks Codewarrior on the Mac when
the switch to PowerPC came down the pike in the mid-'90s, and in
recent years, Codewarrior has had feature parity on both the Mac and
the PC, providing one development environment for both platforms.

This allows builds for either platform to be concurrent... there's no
"porting" beyond tweaking each build for Mac or for PC. IIRC,
programmers not involved with platform-specific features (UI and
Velocity Engine tweaks) are given a PC rather than a Mac, due to Dell
cutting a better deal for desktop machines. Testers are given more
than one of both.

Development of Adobe product is done on Codewarrior, which doesn't
much care if you're running a Mac or a PC, and code created on one is
easily compiled on the other. Some PC-only products are developed
soley on Windows boxes, but the non-Windows specific parts of those
priducts could be developed on Macs running Code Warrior if Apple wins
the bid next upgrade cycle. If Adobe decided to port Image Ready or
start supporting After Effects for the Mac again, they could do it
without a lot of trouble.

As Apple is worth better than 45% of Adobe's revenue, and also
provides fatter profit margins (fewer huge retailers like Best Buy
they need to give deep discounts to) and guaranteed regular upgrade
sales (the professional nature of the Mac design market), Photoshop,
Illustrator and InDesign ain't going nowhere. InDesign in
particular... it's adoption is being driven by Mac pros sick of
waiting for Quark to get on the ball.

Now, as to the rumor that Photoshop 8 is going to be the last to
support MacOS, this is probably true. It's been rumored to be the last
version of Photoshop to support MacOS Classic. Mac OS X will run
Photoshop 9, no worries.

Part of the problem with rumors... they can only paint a small part of
the picture, and not everything will be dead on the money. You've got
to know the industry and how it works to piece the puzzle together,
and corroborate, corroborate, corroborate.

~ Matt Gabriel, Mad Poet