64-bit Adobe CS4 Will Not Ship for Mac

64-bit software Windows

John Nack, Senior Product Manager for Photoshop applications with Adobe wrote on his blog, John Nack on Adobe, that the company won't be coming out with the software for Mac, but that doesn't mean Adobe is abandoning the Apple platform.

Rather, Nack writes, that its because of Apple's decision to abandon its development of Mac OS X's 64-bit Carbon API and go instead with the "Cocoa" platform.

Nack writes:

"As we wrapped up Photoshop CS3, our plan was to ship 64-bit versions of the next version of Photoshop for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac Photoshop (like the rest of the Creative Suite, not to mention applications like Apple's Final Cut Pro and iTunes) relies on Apple's Carbon technology," Nack wrote. "Apple's OS team was busy enabling a 64-bit version of Carbon, a prerequisite for letting Carbon-based apps run 64-bit-native.

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"At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe and other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon," he added. "This means that we'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."

Adobe has as a result been changing course to develop the next version of Photoshop for Mac, but Nack writes it will take longer than anticipated and a change of that magnitude won't be ready by v 4.0.

"Adobe has been taking prompt, pragmatic steps to enable 64-bit Photoshop as quickly as possible on both Mac and Windows. It's a great feature, not a magic bullet, and we're delivering the functionality as quickly as each platform permits," Nack writes.