All this talk of the Mac version of Photoshop and the fact that it’s going to have to be ported to a different framework (Cocoa, from the now deprecated Carbon) has me thinking about the state of 64 bit applications on Windows. I use a 64 bit version of Windows for many reasons, chief among them being able to use more than 3~3.5 Gbs of RAM. I had no illusions about the speed gains - mainly, that there were none, or very little - and that has proven to be my experience. I’m definitely I’m glad I made the decision to go to 64 bit, and given the opportunity would do so again. Living in the 64 bit world has certainly given me an appreciation for applications built to take advantage of the larger address space. .Net applications thankfully are already immune to any switch, since they will run anywhere .Net will run. However, the bulk of applications in Windows are natively compiled, meaning that they will need to compile another version of their program specifically for 64 bits. I’m happy to report that I have yet to experience any problems running 32 bit compiled programs on my 64 bit OS, but I really wish I wouldn’t have to. There are many important applications that still run in 32 bit mode. Flash cannot be run with a 64 bit browser. Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player and Quicktime are all notable applications that have yet to go 64 bit. I know that the majority of computers are still running 32 bit OSs, but thats not a reason for application developers to not address this problem, since it’s clearly only going to get worse.