Steve Rickaby wrote:
>"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
>stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
>etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
>
>In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for
GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people
who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the
formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on FM,
because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new-
feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
There may be other factors at work here. To create universal
binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC
platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, the Apple
development system. That process is, as I understand it, well under
way for the CS 2 applications.
However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to
migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I
know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for
speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform
production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and
might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and
reduces margins.
Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)
In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 for
NeXTSTEP.
Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?
Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?
Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated
environments?
Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?
Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't
PDF based on PostScript?
Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?
Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port
their apps to Mac OS X?
How difficult could it be?
Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>
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