Columns

Before you start dozing off in front of the Olympics, take some time to watch the Tour de France. Cyclist or not, you can't but respect the endurance of those who propel their bikes for 3500km through the Alps and Pyrenees. Doubtless the sordid side of both events will be amply covered in stories about doping, but don't allow that to detract from the achievement of even the Lanterne Rouge, who takes the longest to complete the Tour's marathon of marathons.

So often the Tour is decided by an epic breakaway in the mountains - one rider who steals 10 minutes or more on the peloton by soaring up a brutal climb as if on helium. After the ascent comes a high-speed descent, in which cyclists can outrun cars, risking all to gain a few more seconds. One slight misjudgement and an aspiring yellow jersey will abandon the race for hospital.

Computing may not bring as swift retribution for errors, but the effects are normally far greater.The latest crash victim may be Adobe, so keen to announce its 64-bit version of Photoshop for Windows, but claiming that it has been caught on the hop in doing so for the Mac. While the few remaining Vista 64-bit users left will be able to use Photoshop CS4 in native 64-bit mode, the swelling number of Mac OS X users will have to wait for Photoshop CS5, or possibly even later, to enjoy the same feature.

While 64-bit systems are easy fodder for publicists, they are harder to appreciate when you look behind the hype. If you pootle about

ADVERTISEMENT

a bit in iWork and iLife, 32-bit processing should be fine. If, however, you use your Mac to model 3D for movies, then switching to 64-bit should enable you to work with more than 5 million polygons, greatly enhancing quality, while preserving acceptable performance. There are some modest general performance improvements too, and working with several very large image files should prove significantly quicker. The upshot is that those who demand most from their Macs should get visible improvements in what they can achieve by running 64-bit products. We are also fortunate in that Mac OS X 10.5 inherently supports 64-bit applications - unlike Vista you do not have to buy and install a special release of your operating system.

For Adobe to ship its Windows version of Photoshop 64-bit first confirms that it is still not prepared to invest sufficiently to keep its Mac products at the leading edge, but prefers to cater for those struggling with Microsoft's work-in-progress re-run of Windows ME, Vista.

Although some developers seem to have interpreted Apple's WWDC body language differently, from the first public beta of Mac OS X Apple has made it clear to developers that its Cocoa support libraries are the preferred ones, and that Carbon support is largely to help developers migrate from the classic environment of Mac OS 9. While still the subject of heated debate, Apple also said that only Cocoa would enjoy full 64-bit support in June 2007, and another group in Adobe was prescient enough to ensure that Lightroom uses Cocoa and can now run in 64-bit. Just as with its earlier tardiness in addressing Apple's switch to Intel processors, Adobe got it wrong with Photoshop, and has not been prepared to invest in its Mac development to make up for those errors.

During Lance Armstrong's remarkable series of triumphs in the Tour de France, there was perhaps a certain monotony in the inevitable leader. In other editions of the Tour, the yellow jersey has changed hands every day. Just as Quark did before, so Adobe seems intent now to hand its jersey on.