The Hero of WWDC
(Update 12 June 2005: this post has been edited so that no one person at Apple is singled out—teams are teams, and the entire Intel team deserves a huge round of applause.)
At WWDC a member of the Intel team helped me get NetNewsWire and MarsEdit building as universal binaries. It took a little under two hours. It took as long as that only because these two apps are made up of over a dozen projects, and we had to change the settings (the famous checkbox, plus some other things) and rebuild each project individually.
Code changes? Nope, just time spent mainly in various inspector windows in Xcode getting things set up correctly.
And that’s why I think this transition will be a success—because it was so easy to create universal binaries, thanks to the great work of these folks and the hands-on help they gave developers at WWDC.
I’m aware that for some developers the transition won’t be so smooth. But it will be smooth for a huge number of developers, and that’s an incredible achievement.