LCfiner said:
hmmm.. can't agree that Windows is holding Apple back here at all. Their pro apps like Aperture, Final Cut, etc aren't on windows and are still 32 bit, same as itunes. there's just tons and tons of carbon code that will take a long time to re-code so it has to get put on a schedule.
I guess Apple just doesn't consider a cocoa iTunes to be high enough priority to have it ready right now. maybe next year when carbon is even further deprecated.
I'm a bit disappointed, yes, but I only wanted cocoa itunes to achieve the result of improved performance. I'm seeing that in iTunes 9 (except for grid view browsing... gggrrrr) so I'm pretty happy with the improvements. it's certainly much more responsive to switch between apps, devices and the music library and scrolling through apps is way faster than before so at least they're making some progress.
It steams me because they already re-wrote half the damn app to use WebKit as a rendering engine. I wish they would have finished the job and just re-done the whole thing in 64-bit Cocoa from scratch. The rub (as Gruber points out) is that there are far more iTunes users on Windows than OS X, and Windows has no 64-bit Cocoa runtime for Windows, so they can't just up and do it.
mrkgoo said:
I'm not sure if you're being serious, but I think that it has to do with different development teams within Apple, working on different applications. I wonder if that's why the apps look different? iTunes has always kind of looked different - I don't know if that's a conscious decision to differentiate it, or a side effect of a different team.
I'm being serious. My real point is that Apple is leaving their
most popular application (on either OS) in the stone age. You don't leave the #1 app for last. It should be at the top of the list for a re-write. It doesn't make sense, except for the fact that most iTunes users are on Windows and can't run a 64-bit Cocoa iTunes. Meanwhile the real Apple fans, the ones that own Macs, are stuck with a 32-bit Carbon iTunes because there's no way to bring the app into the future without leaving all those Windows users (and the credit cards tied to their iTunes accounts) in the past.
They made Safari 64-bit Cocoa for OS X, and it's not a big deal because, unlike iTunes, the install base for Safari on Windows is abysmally small and doesn't have a revenue stream associated with it.