I wrote awhile back on how moving an application from PowerPC to Intel isn’t as easy as Steve Jobs has indicated. This topic has come up again and I’m a bit offended by what one author has said in a recent article where the author basically says that developers that have been using Xcode and have programmed in Cocoa have a relatively easy transition moving code. This may be true for simple applications, but doesn’t reflect the reality of many applications out there. In one of the programs I’ve been working on for the last few years, we developed it using Xcode and used Cocoa throughout (OK, one slight component still has to be in Codewarrior as it needs to be CFM). One engineer spent several months making things work on Intel; the main reason is that the application talks to an external device over USB. Any application that talks to an external device is far more complicated than outsiders think. In addition, we have taken, what I consider an extraordinary step, in supporting third party plugins that weren’t designed for Intel. Apple says that users should run applications that require third party plugins in Rosetta by forcing it in the Finder. I find that this is unacceptable to have to run a universal application under Rosetta just so that plugins can run as I want the speed of the universal application. So, additional work was required to get this to work seamlessly (I’m still amazed at how well this works) which most applications don’t have to handle. (In this particular case, it is unlikely that most of the third party plugins we support will be made universal any time soon, so waiting for them to become universal is unrealistic.)
I got my first universal application running in about 5 minutes as the application has no external dependencies (no third party plugins or devices). A lot of applications fall into this category, but end users can’t just say that developers don’t care or aren’t doing enough to move applications to Intel as users don’t know the circumstances around application development. Even if a developer has followed Apple’s lead to switch to Xcode and Cocoa, it doesn’t mean they can put a universal application together in a few hours. As I’ll be ordering a MacBook Pro in a few weeks, I’d love to see all my applications running as universal applications, but the reality is that the smaller applications and many shareware titles will be coming much sooner than the big titles such as Microsoft Word.