NewsMac on Intel

Since Steve Jobs will probably announce Intel Macs tomorrow it’s about time to start talking about NewsMac Pro’s transition to Intel. In theory as a Cocoa application it should just be a case of recompiling. However there are a couple of third party libraries which NewsMac uses which are not universal binaries and which I can’t compile myself, namely eSellerate’s validation library (for handling serial number validation) and Unsanity’s smart crash reports library. While I’m the sure the later will be sorted very quickly it could take a month or two for eSellerate to catch up since everyone originally thought this transition wasn’t due to occur until June. Bottom line is that the release of a universal binary version of NMP won’t happen until at least eSellerate’s library is universal which may not happen for a few months.

If you’re still hanging on to 10.3 and not planning to upgrade before 10.5 hits the shelves then don’t worry, I will continue to offer a PPC only binary for 10.3.9 and later until 10.5 is imminent. (Universal binaries require 10.4 or later you see).

Thanks to Rosetta, NewsMac should run just fine on Intel Macs with no noticeable performance degredation for the majority of users. Given apps like MS Office and all the Abobe apps are almost certainly not ready yet either it’s fair to assume that most apps being run on Intel Macs will be running in emulation for the first few months of the transition anyway.

There won’t be a universal binary of NewsMac 3.2 as it’s a discontinued project.