Carbon Universal Binary Bullshit From Think Secret

At the tail end of a report on the ostensibly slower-than-expected sales to date of the Intel-based iMac (I don’t believe it), Think Secret’s Ryan Katz writes:

Major software vendors like Adobe and Microsoft have been careful not to shed any light on when their popular and performance-critical programs will be ready as Universal Binaries. Both companies’ products are extensively Carbonized — a result of Apple’s transition to Mac OS X — which are far more difficult to convert to Universal Binaries than Cocoa applications written from the ground up for OS X.

The difficulties faced by Microsoft and Adobe moving their suites to universal binaries have very little to do with Carbon; their problem is that they were still using CodeWarrior, and CodeWarrior cannot generate universal binaries. BBEdit is a Carbon application, and was running as a universal binary before last year’s WWDC was over. Version 8.2.3 was released as a universal binary back in August, long before most Cocoa apps. The reason Bare Bones was able to universalize it so quickly is that they’d switched from CodeWarrior to Xcode a few versions ago.

That said, I’m not criticizing Adobe or Microsoft for not having already made the switch to Xcode. Most developers I know consider CodeWarrior a much better IDE than Xcode for C++ development, and also much better-suited for very large projects.

★ Wednesday, 25 January 2006