Boost your Intel Mac

• Article 35 of 89
• MacFormat, March 2007

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Amazing though it may seem, Intel chips have been inside Apple computers for over a year now. It now seems the most normal thing in the world for a Mac to use an Intel processor. The transition has been so smooth, it’s easy to overlook just what a complicated change this has been for Apple. Moving to a different central processor is an immensely difficult task. To work, both the operating system and the software need to speak an entirely new language: it’s as difficult as relocating a company from London to Paris and expecting the staff to come along to do their old jobs even better than before and be natives.

The last time Apple switched processor – from the Motorola 68k range of chips to the PowerPC – it was such a cock-up of planning, it took the company years to move everyone over. Apple didn’t provide any tools for developers to create PowerPC applications of their own. Great chunks of the Mac OS stayed obstinately 68k-only, meaning the Mac had to translate them into PowerPC whenever it tried to run them. It was as though a few of those newly Parisian office workers had refused to learn French, so the company had had to hire an in-house translator; meanwhile, other groups had been left to fend for themselves on the streets without so much as a guide book.

This time, the migration to foreign lands has been much smoother. Thanks to a top-secret group at Apple, OS X spoke Intel fluently from its very first day of existence. Every time Apple released a new version of OS X, the group took the code and made its own Intel version. It was also working on tools that would enable Apple and other companies to develop applications that would work on PowerPC and Intel.

These “Universal Binaries” are now very common. All the applications Apple now sells are Universal Binaries and the vast majority of new programs created by other organisations and people are as well. Any program that’s marked as Universal Binary on the box or on its web site will run perfectly happily on both Intel Macs and PowerPC Macs – and has been tested by Apple to make sure.

Thanks to a handy piece of technology acquired and improved by Apple, most of the old PowerPC applications can run on MacIntels as well. Called Rosetta (www.apple.com/rosetta) after the famous stone used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, this reads the old PowerPC code and translates it to Intel code, just like the old 68k emulator used to. However, this takes time and a great deal of memory, so these older apps run a whole lot slower on MacIntels. A PowerPC app on a G5 will zip past the same app running on a MacIntel and still leave plenty of room for other programs in memory.

Fortunately, it’s relatively easy for a developer to make their application a Universal Binary. Provided they’re using Apple’s XCode development tool, the program’s not too hefty and they’re not using anything too specific to the PowerPC, such as its Altivec graphics acceleration unit, they can usually just tick a box to make the app Universal.

So if you do have a MacIntel and you have some old, smaller programs, maybe shareware or freeware, it’s worth checking to see if a Universal Binary version is available. Many applications now have an update checker built in that can check over the Internet to see if a new version is available, whenever you run the program. You’ll typically find such an option under the program menu when it is running, in its preferences or possibly under the Help menu.

Bigger programs, such as Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, are not yet Universal Binaries. Mainly that’s because larger developers tend to use tools other than XCode, such as CodeWarrior, to develop Universal Binaries. Since CodeWarrior can’t create Universal Binaries – and probably never will – these unlucky companies have been having to migrate their software to XCode, a difficult task in itself, but one complicated by the fact that XCode just isn’t as handy as CodeWarrior when it comes to creating larger applications.

Smaller developers might well be in the same position. They could well have used RealBasic instead of XCode to create their apps, since it’s simpler and more user-friendly. But it’s only with the release of RealBasic 2007 that it’s been able to create Universal Binaries.

Both these groups of developers are making their way to Universal Binaries, but don’t be surprised if they make new releases and paid-for upgrades the only way to get Universal Binaries. Time costs money, after all. In particular, Microsoft Office will only become a Universal Binary with Office 2008 and Adobe Creative Suite with version 3 (CS3), both due out later in the year.

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