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/>
