The Mandelbear's Musings

In the course of putting together the graphics for my upcoming CD, I've discovered that essentially the only way to exchange files with both my artist collaborators and my duplicator is to use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I've even gone so far as to contemplate getting a Mac mini to run them on -- it would be a useful addition to the local computer collection in any case, and runs Ubuntu just fine.

Imagine my disgust, then, on discovering that Adobe doesn't support the Intel Macs yet. This means that there is no Mac that I can go out and buy that will run their stupid software. And neither of my Windows boxes will support their software, either -- not enough RAM, and wimpy CPUs.

At one point,years ago, Adobe ported all their software to Linux and made it available for beta testing, and all of it ran on Solaris as well. Then they stopped. They're nearly as evil and disgusting a monopoly as Microsoft, and if I could avoid both of their product lines and stick to my OS of choice I'd be a happy hacker indeed.

update It seems that the hang-up is caused by yet another piece of proprietary software: all of Adobe's products were developed on MetroWorks' C++ compiler, which doesn't support the Intel macs either. Apple switched over to GCC, which apparently cuts some corners that Adobe was counting on. It's still disgusting -- it doesn't matter which proprietary software you're relying on, you're still going to get screwed. All I can say to the poor drudges putting in their overtime at Adobe is: you should have known this was coming.