Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:38 -0700 1/3/07, Graeme R Forbes 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.

-- 
Steve