I’m one of those guys who bought ZB3 for Mac when the deal was first offered. I never got ZB2 to reliably work on my intel MacBook Pro, and I don’t really have room on my HD to put Windows. So like the rest of you, I’ve been waiting. Every week or so, I search the forums to see if there’s news. There’s certainly a lot of angst, but not a lot of news.
This is what I think is going on. The ZB app used to be a Carbon app. A lot of apps from before weren’t being done on XCode, but with the intel transition, that’s become one necessary migration. Some people have had problems with this transition. My guess is that, if the only thing was that they were moving to XCode, ZB3 for Mac would have been out in the expected 6 month timeframe (ZB2 shows that the fundamental algorithms can be ported to the Mac). But of course, ZB3 didn’t come out in the expected timeframe. Perhaps the new algorithms were tougher to port for some reason. More likely, though, something else came up.
When OS X 10.5 was showcased, it became apparent that 64bit would be Cocoa only. Other technologies would need Cocoa as well, and the writing is on the wall that Cocoa is the future. My suspicion is that, during the course of the project, they decided to move to Cocoa as well. And it was in this transition, where they had problems. Maybe this isn’t what happened. Maybe they simply tried to revamp the codebase, to factor out the platform-specific code into small areas to make porting easier.
In either case, they had problems with the resulting code not working as expected. Either with buggy behavior or (more likely) with some form or horrible performance problem. Whatever the problems were, it’s clear that they didn’t fully understand their scope. They made some internal predictions and they publicized them. The release date came and went, and even though they’d tried to be careful about saying the predictions were unofficial, a lot of already frustrated people became more frustrated and more critical.
The people at Pixo (who are, after all, just people) were naturally frustrated by their failure to hit the target date, too, but on top of that they felt like they had egg on their face from having made some bad public predictions. Still, though, they make some more predictions. Those dates slipped past, too. After a couple of rounds of incorrect predictions, the decision was made that further predictions (unofficial or otherwise) would likely cause more harm than good.
And that’s where we are right now. I don’t think we’re being ignored, as such. I think that someone decided that inaccurate predictions were just making them look worse than silence. Sure, some of us are grateful for information. But some others just take any contact as an excuse to be a turd. Since the only news that’s going to be really popular is “Come and get it”, they apparently decided that they’ll say nothing else until that’s the message. (And even when the message is “Come and get it” there will be angry posts by people saying, “That’s ALL I get?”)
In the meantime, we spend a lot of time interpreting this silence in various ways: big things are coming, nothing is coming, Pix hates Macs, etc. None of these interpretations are necessarily warranted, though. Big things might be coming. ZB4 has been mentioned. I’d be delighted to get ZB4 (or ZB 3.5 or whatever) instead of 3.1. But the extraordinary delay probably doesn’t have as much to do with upgrade goodness as it does simply to the fact that something was awry with the code porting. In which case, all we can really hope for is that ZBx for Mac works cleanly and snappily.
Now consider the second possibility, that nothing is coming. Remember Half-Life 2. After a certain point, if problems are bad enough, Pix might potentially pull the plug on the Mac. Hopefully this won’t happen. We can probably increase the chances of it happening, though, if we convince the company that no matter what they do, they lose. In that case, they might decide to keep the costs of porting and spend them on new features for a Windows-only ZB4. I’m hoping this doesn’t happen, because that decision might guide other companies’ plans.
And lastly, about the recurrent statement that Pix doesn’t care about Mac. That’s adolescent nonsense and I wish people would stop saying it. There are a lot of companies out there who don’t care about Macs. Softimage is probably one of them. Lots of game makers surely fit this category. But Pix has been working over a year to deliver a product. The delay isn’t because they don’t care. It’s because things haven’t been going well. The fact that they kept at it means they DO care. The fact that they’ve stopped giving us predictions about when ZB Mac isn’t part of that equation one way or the other. Like I say, I think they tried making predictions, and that didn’t work out, and now they’ve simply decided not to make further predictions in public. If that’s the case, then trying to bait them into a reply is adolescent and counter-productive.
Maybe they might have made us happier if they’d have talked about the code-level issues they were having. Remember that there’s more than just us out here. The programmers have a peer group, too, and they might not be happy about publicizing their travails. Plus, it could give solace to the enemy, or worse, give clues to ZB secrets. It’s a lot harder to blaze a new trail than it is to follow along once someone has shown you the path. A little hint might be a lot.
And maybe the reason you can’t get a prediction is nobody in Pix can either. The programmers may be so frustrated that they won’t give predictions to anyone. I doubt that’s it, though.
I think that people at Pixologic just looked at all the angst and said, “Why don’t we just change and do like Blizzard does: ‘We’ll release it when it’s ready’? People get impatient, but they’re happily impatient. People aren’t hating on Blizzard because a game isn’t out yet.” That’s what I think the silence is about, at any rate. And yes, I see where the analogy between Pix and Blizzard falls down. I still think that’s what the silence is about, though.
I’m eager to use ZB, too. I’ve bought every ZB book I can get my hands on, and I’ve bought several ZB training vids. It bothers me that there are people improving their skills, leaving me behind. Maybe I could buy a PC just to run ZB on it. A lot of people can’t. If you’re one of the ones who can, please don’t bait the ones who can’t.
Peace, friends. 
Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Sometimes it gets taken off and left in the dumpster.
…please don;'t though…i like everyone 
…we’re all z brush nutters here right? 
