Quicktime (Mac vs. PC)

[Stereodude]

Why is it that a dual core Macbook Pro 1.866GHz can play the Quicktime 1080p trailers with no problems, but they need a 3GHz Dual Core P4 on a PC? Is the Mac version of QT that much better optimized?

 

[Tannin]

I think it's likely to be the other way around: i.e., the PC version, like all Apple-written PC software, is appallingly bad. They seem to have a special gift for it.

 

[Sol]

That and the fact that the architechture for the Core Duo is so much better than the P4 that a 1.866Ghz Macbook is probably just faster in raw terms than a 3Ghz Dual Core P4...

I think a major factor affecting performance is that when apple ported quicktime over to windows they ran into a few problems with memory and resource managment paradigms. Rather than rewrite large portions of thier code they ported bits of the operating system with it.
I suspect that it is the extra layer of non native code that makes Apple software on Windows less than it is on OSX...

 

[Tannin]

.... that would also explain why it takes a ridiculously long time to load then. Compare, for example, Quicktime with Windows Media Player startup times. And I don't think that is attributable to pre-loading on boot the way it is with the Internet Explorer cheat.

And, for that matter, maybe that's also why Photoshop takes such a ridiculously long time to start up, and an even more ridiculous length of time to shut down .... maybe Adobe did the same thing, ported great slabs of Mac stuff over. Is Photoshop a horrible slow bloated slug on Macs too? Or just Windows?

 

[Sol]

Adobe have thier own cross-platform development kit (Which they licence out to third parties). I think it's better on the PC than the Apple one is but it's probably not going to be as good on the Mac as code written specifically for OSX...

At any rate I think Photoshop mostly loads slow because it loads a heap of stuff at startup, organises scratch files, loads plugins and palettes and filters (oh my...) and whatnot.
Mostly the cross platform development tools are for gui stuff, photoshop has a fairly basic GUI (componant wise) so I imagine Adobe can make thier porting tools reasonably clean. Apples software seems to be all about fancy GUI componants so it's likely required to do a lot more work arrounds that hurt performance.

Plus adobes porting tools are a comercial product, Apple's seem to be just a collection of adhoc stuff they realised they needed so I'd guess that adobes tools have seen a little more software engineering...

 

[Tannin]

OK, fair enough. But riddle me this (as the thread wanders off into complete irrelevance to Sterodude's original question) - why the hell do Adobe products (and virtually no others, thank god) take forever to shut down? I mean, this is seriously crap programming. You have saved and closed the data file already, then you hit the little black X and .... well, any sensible program says "OK Windows, here is all the memory I was using, I don't want it anymore, goodnight and good luck". That's it. Finito.

Not Photoshop. Nope, Photoshop has finished doing everything you asked it to do, but it sits there for around 1/3rd as lokg as the interminable time it took to start up, doing ...... nothing! (Except hogging the CPU and thrashing the hard drives like crazy for no possible reason I can think of.)

Photoshop sucks.

Adobe sucks.

Apple sucks.

George W Bush sucks.

Oh, bugger this, I'm going to the Glenelg River to see some emu wrens.

 

[timwhit]

Macromedia Products also take a very long time to shutdown.

 

[Mercutio]

... and are evil.

 

[timwhit]

... and are evil.

How is Dreamweaver all that evil?

 

[Mercutio]

It is a gateway product that may lead the weak-willed to use of other Macromedia software.

 

[timwhit]

:roll:

 

[mubs]

Photoshop sucks.

Adobe sucks.

Apple sucks.

George W Bush sucks.

Slick! I liked how you slipped that in there.

 

[Buck]

OK, fair enough. But riddle me this (as the thread wanders off into complete irrelevance to Sterodude's original question) - why the hell do Adobe products (and virtually no others, thank god) take forever to shut down? I mean, this is seriously crap programming. You have saved and closed the data file already, then you hit the little black X and .... well, any sensible program says "OK Windows, here is all the memory I was using, I don't want it anymore, goodnight and good luck". That's it. Finito.

Not Photoshop. Nope, Photoshop has finished doing everything you asked it to do, but it sits there for around 1/3rd as lokg as the interminable time it took to start up, doing ...... nothing! (Except hogging the CPU and thrashing the hard drives like crazy for no possible reason I can think of.)

What, are you running Photoshop 6 on a Pentium 233MMX? PS closes quickly for me. Granted, it has a few jobs to end when closing (like cleaning up it's scratch disk and the pagefile), but I've never known it to be such a slug. After a quick comparison, it seems to close about as quickly as GIMP.

 

[sechs]

Adobe have thier own cross-platform development kit (Which they licence out to third parties). I think it's better on the PC than the Apple one is but it's probably not going to be as good on the Mac as code written specifically for OSX...

Happen to know what this product is? Last time I checked, Adobe used Visual Studio on Windows and CodeWarrior (!) on MacOS.

 

[Sol]

Happen to know what this product is? Last time I checked, Adobe used Visual Studio on Windows and CodeWarrior (!) on MacOS.

I really can't remember what it's called but your probably quite right about the IDEs they use. What I'm talking about is just a set of utility classes to ease the portability of code by abstracting the GUI (and possibly some other functions) one more layer.

It shouldn't really make the application much less efficient but it does tend to make it harder to use the native APIs quite as efficiently as if you were writing native code for just one platform. (Not admitedly that I have done a huge ammount of cross platform development).