Thursday, October 26, 2006

Adobe Soundbooth: No PowerPC support, ever.

Adobe has announced a new sound editing application called Soundbooth, and has posted a free beta preview of the application. That's the good news. Now the bad news:
Will there be a PowerPC version?

No. Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple's future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set.
Visit the Adobe Intel Mac FAQ for more information.
That is extremely disappointing, especially considering that the vast majority of current Mac users have PowerPC Macs, and many stores (including Apple's own refurbished Mac store) still sell PowerPC Macs.

[Update 2006-10-30]

Adobe's John Nack responds:
Here's the reality: 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. That's all good, and it makes Mac development more attractive. Users benefit from having developers' efforts go elsewhere (features, performance tuning, etc.), rather that into parallel, duplicate work. In the case of Soundbooth, the team could leverage Adobe's expertise in building great audio tools for Intel chips (namely Audition) to bring the app to market faster and with a richer feature set.