I'm actually surprised that Microsoft, Adobe and the other big cross-platform companies don't do this with their software. If you think about Photoshop for example, it's basically just a UI on top of a lot of matrix math. It seems especially short-sighted because Apple has been essentially deprecating Carbon for a while and at the last WWDC did so officially.
It would seem to be straightforward to make the UI platform-specific and the underlying image processing code cross-platform. That way you'd have an app that looks and works great on Mac and Windows, the platform-specific teams could make use of platform-specific niceties and yet the application itself would be the same underneath. It's not like Adobe and Microsoft don't have enough programmers to be able to do this.
I did notice that Adobe Lightroom has a Cocoa wrapper around Lua guts and so obviously some parts of the company are moving this way.
by Rob Keniger — Feb 01
It would seem to be straightforward to make the UI platform-specific and the underlying image processing code cross-platform. That way you'd have an app that looks and works great on Mac and Windows, the platform-specific teams could make use of platform-specific niceties and yet the application itself would be the same underneath. It's not like Adobe and Microsoft don't have enough programmers to be able to do this.
I did notice that Adobe Lightroom has a Cocoa wrapper around Lua guts and so obviously some parts of the company are moving this way.