Adobe Lightroom Beta 2: Universal
While Adobe's main applications are "due out sometime this or next year" as universal binaries, the yet-to-be-released Aperture-competitor "Lightroom" has been
released as a 2nd Beta today. It also has a new feature: The crop tool (crop, rotate-crop). If you've got an intel Mac, you can try this software natively now.
Adobe's Lightroom fills a gap between iPhoto and Aperture from Apple. The gap being that Aperture is horribly slow on anything but a very decent PowerMac with lots of RAM and iPhoto is not really an application aimed at professional photographers. ;)
Notably absent from Beta 2 is still a Windows version of the application. The Universal Binary shows that development on the Mac-side is probably done with Xcode now, something Adobe probably hasn't really touched before Lightroom. The question is whether it'll be easy for Adobe to port the application to Windows at all. It
could be easy if Apple revived Cocoa for Windows API (in the days of Rhapsody, Apple had a working Yellow Box environment for Windows, and just like Mac OS X, this project is believed to
not have stopped until now, although no actual product was released since that time). We're very off-topic by now, so let's have a little more of that right now: If Apple
were to release Cocoa for Windows and Adobe
would start to develop more of their applications in Xcode and they'd be running in Cocoa on the Windows platform, too, Apple could attract more developers to the Mac platform. And once developers start using Xcode as their primary development environment, bringing software to the Mac would be a very easy task.