Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack says that a 64-bit version of the Creative Suite is in the works, but it will be for Windows only. Most likely, Mac users won’t get to use 64-bit versions of Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator until Creative Suite 5 ships.

“The development is frankly bittersweet for us: On the one hand we’re delighted to be breaking new ground with Photoshop, and when processing very large files on a suitably equipped machine, Photoshop x64 realizes some big performance gains,” Mr. Nack said. “On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and it’s a drag that the Mac x64 revision will take longer to deliver. We will get there, but not in CS4.”

Since Creative Suite 4 for the Mac will be 32-bit only, that means Windows users will have a couple of feature Mac users won’t. Most notably, Windows users will be able to work with files

larger that 4GB since the 64-bit version of CS4 will be able to access larger amounts of memory. It plus means that 64-bit Windows users will about a ten percent performance improvement compared to 32-bit Windows and Mac OS X users.

The reason Mac users will remain in the 32-bit world for CS4, according to Mr. Nack, is considering Photoshop and the other Creative Suite applications were written in Carbon instead of the Cocoa application framework. Since Apple decided to drop its plans for a 64-bit version of Carbon, that means Adobe’s applications must be ported to Cocoa to remain on a 64-bit development path — which will be no small undertaking.

“This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins, potentially affecting by a million lines of cipher, to move it from Carbon to Cocoa,” Mr. Nack said.

On the surface, it…

Orginal post by Top Tech News