Adobe Photoshop + Mac: John Nack has hit back at criticism of his firm’s Mac commitment.

Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack has hit back at criticism of his firm’s Mac commitment.

Nack has also confirmed that Photoshop and the other component products of Adobe Creative Suite 3 will run natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs when the software ships next year.

The comments were in response to critics who derided Adobe for not offering support for Apple’s legacy PowerPC Macs when it released new beta audio software, Soundbooth, last week.

He asked Mac users to think on the reality of future Mac software development: "Apple’s migration to Intel chips means that it’s easier to develop for both Mac and Windows, because instead of splitting development resources optimizing for two different chip architectures, you can focus on just one."

He added that this also meant Adobe was able to use Intel processor skills within its Windows development teams to build the Soundbooth beta for Intel Macs.

He asked: "If you were Adobe and had started developing a new application at exactly the time when Apple told you, ‘This other chip architecture is dead to us,’ would you rather put your efforts into developing for that platform, or would you focus elsewhere?"

There is a difference between developing new applications and extending existing ones, he added in an attempt to calm user fears that Adobe will cease PowerPC development for Photoshop and other important creative applications.

These applications have already been tuned for the PowerPC processor, which means maintaining support for them is less challenging (and expensive) than developing software for two chip platforms from scratch, he explained.

"Someday Apple, Adobe and everyone else will stop supporting PowerPC, as they did with 68k chips and Mac OS 9, but not anytime soon," he said.

Summing up, he asked: "If Adobe were to bring other Windows-only applications to the Mac, would [Mac users] be happy about that, or would [they] rather give it hell for focusing on features and functionality, rather than a discontinued chip architecture?"

- Jonny Evans, Macworld.co.uk