Well, the writing was on the wall as soon as Cocoa was released. While Apple maintained both Carbon and Cocoa as first-class citizens as far as the UI was concerned, it was obvious that Cocoa was the future of the Mac's API. Adobe chose to not use Cocoa and stick to Carbon even after it was obvious that it would be deprecated.
This forced Adobe to rewrite all of their Carbon apps, which is what took all of the time. Had Adobe gone with the blessed Cocoa kit and XCode tool chain from the beginning, they could have just recompiled Photoshop and had a Universal binary immediately. They chose not to.
> every single Flash application can be quickly and easily recompiled to support it
Now, what are the chances of that happening? Not every developer will care to update their application.
If all native apps are running fast with the hypothetical new hardware and Flash based apps were slow as hell, Flash based apps would start to get deleted very fast...
> the writing was on the wall as soon as Cocoa was released.
Cocoa came first but Apple couldn't convince anyone to port their applications from Mac classic to a completely new OS with no marketshare. So they had to develop the Carbon API to get developer support.
> Adobe chose to not use Cocoa and stick to Carbon even after it was obvious that it would be deprecated.
Which was a smart move for Adobe. They have a lot of Mac code and converting it all to Cocoa is essentially a complete rewrite. You expect Adobe to have perfect knowledge of the future or a time machine.
> They chose not to.
It wasn't much a choice. OS X was in no way a sure thing. In fact, the only thing that actually allowed OS X to survive was Adobe's support of the platform.
> Now, what are the chances of that happening? Not every developer will care to update their application.
Did you read what I said? Isn't the possibility of Flash developers hitting "recompile" a lot more likely than Objective-C developers actually having to make code changes to support this new feature?
> If all native apps are running fast with the hypothetical new hardware and Flash based apps were slow as hell, Flash based apps would start to get deleted very fast...
Adobe's Flash compiler is exactly that, a compiler, which converts Flash apps into native code. If Adobe has done their job right, it's unlikely you'd notice the difference. And if you did, you would just delete them. Just like you would delete a crappy Objective-C app -- those already exist in droves.
Well, the writing was on the wall as soon as Cocoa was released. While Apple maintained both Carbon and Cocoa as first-class citizens as far as the UI was concerned, it was obvious that Cocoa was the future of the Mac's API. Adobe chose to not use Cocoa and stick to Carbon even after it was obvious that it would be deprecated.
This forced Adobe to rewrite all of their Carbon apps, which is what took all of the time. Had Adobe gone with the blessed Cocoa kit and XCode tool chain from the beginning, they could have just recompiled Photoshop and had a Universal binary immediately. They chose not to.
> every single Flash application can be quickly and easily recompiled to support it
Now, what are the chances of that happening? Not every developer will care to update their application.
If all native apps are running fast with the hypothetical new hardware and Flash based apps were slow as hell, Flash based apps would start to get deleted very fast...