When bad things happen to good Mac's [OT]

[Mark Guertin]

On 21-Jul-05, at 12:59 PM, Derick Centeno wrote:

> I agree Mark.  It's about the tools and the right tools for the  
> particular job.  Sound's like a Home Improvement one liner, but  
> hey, that's the deal!
>
> By the way, I also have been a user of TSS products going way back  
> to Champion Server as well.  That's so cool.
>
> I expect we'll see more tools and the tools we know will and should  
> morph into greater and better things because of Apple's switch to  
> Intel.
> What do you think?

That's a tough call really.  I imagine that most (if not all) the  
major players will be making the switch, but they won't bother until  
it's time.  For the most part if your code is decent it's trivial to  
port (endianess, some library and framework adjustments) .. or at  
least it is for this kind of tool.  For other more complicated things  
that take advantage of Altivec and the other ppc only stuff it may be  
a bit more work.  But I honestly don't see many of them making the  
jump before the machines are actually _shipping_.  Some of the  
developers out there with much more complicated applications that are  
using advanced features may be at least starting to port some of that  
stuff over, but long experience in this industry has told me that no  
one who knows what is going on is going to spend long man hours  
porting to an un-released OS version .. it's _always_ trouble in  
apple's camp.

As for new stuff, maybe, maybe not.  If there are larger crowds  
attracted because of the move, which I suspect there may well be,  
then it may also attract more development to happen, but other than  
that I think things will just be business as usual for OSX once the  
transition has been made.  I don't see a lot of new players jumping  
into this game though honestly.  HFS is not the nicest filesystem to  
be trying to fix up and to build new tools of this sort you would  
really have to know what you're doing.  As always, Apple's released  
documentation for HFS leaves much to be desired.

Lastly, don't hold your breath.  The actual transition won't really  
happen for a LONG while.  I think that Apple's estimates were pretty  
aggressive on the changeover.  Either way it's going to be messy when  
it all starts going down.  Even if they can follow what they've  
stated (which I think is too aggressive personally) it will be many  
years before PPC macs are out of the pipeline IMHO.

Mark