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Weblog:   Switch to MacTel: Easy or Not?
Subject:   It's the testing, stupid
Date:   2005-09-02 18:07:15
From:   positron
Even though I cannot directly cite Chizen, he seems to be widely misquoted/misunderstood. AFAIR, in the interview he mentioned, that the necessary testing would make it impossible to deliver an Intel version of the current suite, CS2.


And he is right. Testing an application suite like CS2 cannot be fully automated, and cannot be accomplished in a day. A product like this takes several months to be fully tested, and this is simply to long considering Adobes recent 12 month/release cycle to be done on the fly for a product already out in the market.


And that is all he said. He didn't complain about porting being so difficult. All he said is, they will have an Intel version ready of the next shipping release, which happens to be not right tomorrow, and maybe even after Apple starts selling Intel Macs. It may not be too long, anyway.


Anyhow, the way the press snaps this up, totally misleads technically challenged people, implying things like Steve Jobs lied or such. Actually, Apple has brilliant material out there concerning the switch, you can watch a whole bunch of WWDC sessions, read tons of good material.

In session 401, Chris Espinosa says quite clearly, what developers have to expect during their transision: XCode, GCC4, very few API changes, endianess. That's it for coding. Might not be easy, if you have to go the whole path, but definitely seems possible. But then he simply says: "and then, test it". This is the bombshell, Steve didn't so explicitely talk about, because it is a no brainer, that this has to be done when switching development environments. Guess why Office/Mac still isn't Mach-O, as a side-thought. Still, yet, this is, for most of the bigger projects, the most time consuming part, because simply because an app compiles under Intel, thanks to endianess it can potentially misbehave anywhere, and might even do so unnoticed. This will be a problem for a long time, and while it only concerns code that directly deals with byte order, will create most of the funniest side effects on the mac platform yet to come.


Just my thoughts...