Freesome - Pete Hobson

Most people are aware that Adobe, the provider of many key MAC Applications such as photoshop and Flash, has decided to hold off producing native Intel versions of their applications until the next major release cycle.

This means in practice that any Intel Macs have to use a piece of Apple software called Rosetta, which translates (duh) PowerPC code directly to Intel code. Ive now completed a couple of flash projects on the Mac, so is Rosetta up to the job?

The answer is generally yes. In use the Apps are fairly responsive and I dont really notice a significant performance hit. In fact I would go as far as to say, for flash work in particular the translation actually offers me a few benefits by viewing flash movies at a speed closer to that which most mac users will be able to obtain - due of course to the killer speed of my puter in native mode...

However, there is one huge problem, and thats switching between applications. During switching there is a real bad delay, presumably while the emulator memory is paged in or out. This occurs even on with my (i had assumed) generous 2gb of memory. Worse still the wait gets loner and longer as time goes by. This would'nt be so much of a problem if by its nature Flash didnt require quite so many other supporting applications, but in my typical development session i have at least a browser, image editing software, and external IDE (Ecllipse) for editing the actionscript. And it seems this combination is proving fatal.

Its not enough for me to switch back to PC, but it is damn annoying, and i'm certainly looking forward to the next flash release with as much anticipation as i've ever felt before.