Yesterday, I sent the following query to Curious Labs: When will a carbon or cocoa port of Poser be available, for use in Mac OS X? Less than 10 minutes later, I received the following answer: I believe that will be done for Poser 5 but am checking on that. Within 30 minutes, I received another message: In the future there will be an updater that will allow the current Poser to run at full functionality under the OS9 compatibility environment of OS-X. The release date of this is currently unannounced. We will not be releasing a full OSX compliant version (Carbonized) until the next full version of Poser. Granted, if you search the web, there are numerous warez sites claiming to have Poser 5 betas in their possession.

Good news. Any word on whether Poser 5 will support multiple processors? - JimX

Poser 4 and PPP currently work fine under the Classic compatibility layer of Mac OS X 10.0.3, although the trackball and the other widgets for moving the scene around tend to be hypersensitive; so be prepared to hit the undo if your scene jumps far beyond what you intended.

The last time I asked CL about a native OS X version of Poser, the answer was deliberately vague -- I believe the translation was "when the overwhelming majority of our installed Mac user base is running OS X," which is probably the feeling in most Mac software companies. If the Classic sandbox is as good as everyone says it is, the incentive to lose the entire 9.x user base isn't great (but I'm sure they see the writing on the wall). The graphics goodies such as OpenGL don't seem to be much of an temptation to switch yet, either.

PhotoShop will be the tipping element on the teeter-totter. When PhotoShop is carbonized, every fence-sitting graphic artist and their cousin will hop to the new OS. Corel has announced that Bryce and Painter will be carbonized soon (looks like end of summer), Maya for Macs will be out then, etc.,... but I suspect that PhotoShop's conversion date will be the trigger because so many people use it with their other software. Carolly

The only trouble with waiting for Photoshop to be carbonized is that the current version works so well under Classic. I suspect we'll have to wait for Photoshop 6.5 before we see a Mac OS X version.

I would have thought its the adoption of Cocoa in major apps that will be the real reason to go X. Carbon Apps will work under 8.1 and above anyhow. My understanding is that carbon is a transition API and its with Cocoa that is X native only. I looked at X and played with it but for almost all of what I do its easier and faster in 9. Until big stuff becomes better in X, I don't see compelling reasons to use it. ( I'll probably need a hardware upgrade then too) Catch 22 or what?