Hi Chip,

You said:

"Absolutely not. Until very recently, one can program the Mac via Cocoa or Carbon. But the fact is now you pretty much need to use Cocoa (XCode) in order to access the 64-bit capabilities of some Macs. And as we all know, a 8Gig Mac running in 32-bit mode only allows access to a couple of the Gbs-- and with the sorry and varied state of the OpenGL drivers and video cards on Macs-- there's no wonder significant issues arise."

That is certainly true and Apple should have discontinued Carbon support a few years ago and force developers to use Cocoa. Like you said, until recently this was not the case. However, I just wanted to mention that Apple in fact years ago told major software companies to start porting everything over to Cocoa but some did not listen. Now, you see several big names playing catchup like Adobe that is having to re-write their entire Photoshop in Cocoa from the ground up. This is not easy, even for Adobe that has a lot of resources to throw in to it. In fact, their press announcment on CS5 said they have 7 full time programmers working on the re-write in Cocoa along with Apple support when needed. A company like e-on I don't think has near that amount of programmers to throw at it full time and so I think it may be a while for them. I know Autodesk has more resources and will get there and Modo has already said they will be working on a 4.x 64 bit Apple Cocoa version that will be free to their users. The bottom line is many were just lazy, wanted to save resources, etc. and now are being caught having to work this out so it seems like it happened all of a sudden.

Like I said, a good way to do things is the Maxon way. They had their act together and followed the tech announcement years ago from Apple and started porting it a couple of years ago until they had the current re-write in Cocoa. This was advised and something they listened to that is paying off for them in the long run. Now, they can just focus on bug fixes or new features and are good to go. A model many companies, not just e-on should have followed.

Eventually, I think you will see most all major applications in 64 bit regardless of platform or some may decide they don't have the resources and choose to drop support for more than one OS. I know what you mean about having to support products and it being labor intensive, but keep in mind this is not unique to Apple as some have written. This is true for any OS that makes revision changes, even some Windows updates that are "patches" and updates can throw a curve into the code forcing an update. It just an issue with any developer regardless of Apple, Microsoft or Linux that is a part of the process. That's why I think that you REALLY have to consider what you are getting into when deciding to support more than one OS. It will task anyone, it's just a matter of what resources you have to throw at it.

One last note, you keep saying "Boot Camp" and while you can, I found the best solution is to not use it and instead go with 2 separate dedicated hard drives, one for each OS. That way you simply hold the "opton/alt" key at bootup and select which OS you want to boot into. If anyone wants the steps feel free to PM and I can help.

Hope your projects are going well, I look forward to seeing them.

Jeff

Development on: Mac Pro 2008, Duel-Boot OS - Snow Leopard 10.6.6 & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon , 10GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.