But it's NOT stable. On my Mac Pro it crashes after some hours use. Also, on 10.6.8, the workspaces malfunction.

The current version (in a "public preview" beta form) is indeed a Universal binary, and will be a free update for owners of FL5.0. It's overdue, true, but here it is.

Porting an application such as FontLab Studio to a universal binary is everything but trivial. Fontlab Ltd. is working on it, but a universal build will not be part of a bugfix.

BTW, a more detailed description of things changed in FontLab Studio 5.0.3 can be found at
http://www.fontlab.com/news/announcements/fontlab-studio-5.0.3/

A.

One must still concede that at this late date, converting to UB is way overdue!

I didn't say it was easy - what I said was the company promised a UB would be released soon. I paid hundreds for FontLab but we STILL don't have a UB. It's difficult work, but it was promised to the public. We paid but didn't get the UB.

Don

(1) I wonder if you could be more specific as for who and where promised a universal binary version of FontLab Studio 5? As far as I can tell, no-one from our company made that claim.
(2) What are the reasons for that you'd like a universal binary version?
A.

Your company's customer service department told me a Universal Binary is (or was) weeks away.

Since when do we need a reason for needing a Universal Binary? Quite honestly, had I known a Universal Binary was NOT around the corner, I wouldn't have spent the money.

Don

I'm sorry to hear that someone from our company was not up-to-date. We have communicated on numerous occasions that we don't have immediate plans to release a universal version of FontLab Studio 5 because the porting effort will be significant. Most certainly, this would not be a free update anyway. But fortunately, FontLab Studio 5 is an application with very modest CPU and memory requirements, so that it works just fine on Intel-based Macs through the Rosetta environment. In fact, we have heard of no problems at all that would be Intel-Mac specific (I'm not saying Studio 5 is entirely bug-free, but the problems occur on both Intel and PowerPC platforms). FL Studio not Photoshop or InDesign, for which the PowerPC versions really were very sluggish on Intel Macs. On my own MacBook Pro, FontLab Studio runs faster than on my older PowerBook, because the Intel CPU has more than twice the speed of the PowerPC. Yes, a native Intel version would run even faster, but the differences really are not noticeable.

Please bear in mind that developing a universal binary actually means developing for two separate platforms. This massively increases the amount of the necessary QA, and we're a company of very moderate size. I don't think that releasing a universal binary just for the sake of releasing it is worth the effort. FontLab Studio is a highly complex application, and we're certainly not Adobe or Apple to have dozens of engineers and testers aboard. So we're very carefully making those decisions. I believe that fine-tuning and improving the quality of a single binary release is more worth than sloppily releasing a double binary -- especially, since, as I said, FontLab Studio really does have a small memory and CPU footprint.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,
Adam Twardoch
product and marketing manager
Fontlab Ltd.

Since new Macs are Intel, Fontlab is already available for windoze, and Apple's development tools are quite versatile, i would have thought creating another Intel version, albeit for a different platform, wouldn't be such a huge task.

And with all Macs now having been Intel-based for a year, it seems the time for which a PPC only version will be acceptable is rapidly waning

There are some caveats to that. First, we have developed our own special process for porting the code from Intel (Windows) to Mac (PowerPC). This involves some changes to the code that must be re-done when porting to a universal architecture. And secondly, probably more importantly, all our software projects on the Mac are developed using Metroworks, *the* traditional application development environment on the Mac. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Intel Mac platform exists for a comparably long time now, Metroworks never released a compiler for Intel Mac processors. This means that our developers would need to port the code from Metroworks to Apple XCode to make them universal. I have spoken to several developers, within and outside of our company, and they have assured me that it is not a trivial task.

It is not so that we are not entirely interested in releasing universal binaries. But this simply means that we need a group of developers to spend time solely on that for several months -- without fixing existing bugs or adding new features, and potentially introducing new bugs in the process. For a relatively small company as ours, hiring a bunch of guys to spend some months working on something only so that we can put a blue yin-yang logo to the packaging is a tough decision -- because it will quite clearly not pay off. The application will not become "better" or even noticeably "faster" as the result.

We may, in the end, decide to do this -- but be assured that it is neither a trivial nor a quick process, despite the nice marketing talk that Steve Jobs have been giving us about this.

Sounds like another Eudora fiasco. Can't afford to spend the time or money to make it a universal binary. You have to understand that those of us who spent the money are going to shake our heads wondering why we did. This thread has me wondering of the fate of FontLab.

Don

On June 8th you posted in this very thread that your company was working on a UB release of FontLab:

> Fontlab Ltd. is working on it, but a universal
> build will not be part of a bugfix.

Then on October 2nd you posted this:

> (1) I wonder if you could be more specific as for
> who and where promised a universal binary version
> of FontLab Studio 5? As far as I can tell, no-one
> from our company made that claim.

...so which is it?

Don

Both are true. We're working on it, but we have not made any promises as for the potential timeframe. I have extensively explained in this thread why this is so.

the comments from the developer are great. Imagine if Adobe gave damn like these guys do. I think I will get FontLab Pro now just from seeing this communication.

Excellent point.

Highly unusual for a large developer to reply, let alone go into any detail.

I haven't had issues with Fontlab Studio on my Mac Pro, but i haven't had a chance to use it since upgrading to Leopard.

With the huge number of bugs in Leopard, i wouldn't be surprised if Fontlab Studio is goobered up.

I'm still unclear as to whether FontLab is working on a Universal Binary given the conflicting posts. It's fair for any customer to want a timeline/roadmap on UB release.

Don

Hey Adam,

How's that UB version version coming? Are you guys still "working on it?" I mean, it's only been what – 4 years?

I get that you guys are on a really tight budget, what with the 20 or so other programs you develop, not to mention all those massively underpriced AFS licenses. Too busy developing OTMaster and buying up old Macromedia source code; and too busy mining the wallets of new customers to address the needs of existing ones with a UB update that should have come out years ago.

@poly1: version 5.1 is UB.