Capture One is native M1 now

photobunny

https://www.captureone.com/en/new-update/upgrade

After what feels like an eternity we have Capture One 21.2 with native Apple M-series support. I am delighted to report that as it says on the tin, it is markedly faster than under Rossetta and markedly faster than most of my Intel machines at importing and generating previews. The thing that really sets it apart is the more mundane tasks like painting in a mask, panning the image, zooming in and out, and previewing a preset; these tasks feel smoother than any machine I have tried prior as if previous machines had that little extra latency between mouse click and action.

Ton14

Capture One announced the development of the programme for the iPad. The new Ipad Pro now has the M1 processor in it, but it is apparently not yet suitable for installing the current version of C1.

At the moment I have C1 running on the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 and it works fine, because it's just a Windows 10 computer. However, the Ipad Pro works much better as a tablet.

Do you know if C1 works on the new Ipad Pro with the M1 processor? I know everything about Windows, but nothing about Apple, hence my question.

photobunny

Capture One being M1 doesn't mean that it can run on a iPad. The OS are very different between the iPad and macOS. Thats kinda like saying Windows apps can run on a Mac when they are both AMD64.

Now onto the meat of the topic: The developers could shove the core code into Xcode and compile it and it'll run on iPad. But that'll have no user interface and would be a poor experience. So what is happening (at least the impression I got after a wee yap) between now and 2022 is that they are building a UI for Capture One for iPad. Much like the full Photoshop is on iPad just now, but Adobe haven't built a UI to for all of the tools yet and some non core functions need ported from basically Flash to real code.

When Capture One comes to the iPad next year you should expect a fully tailored application that plays to the strengths of the iPad.

Ton14

Thanks @photobunny very clear.

I stick to the full version on my Surface Pro 7, which I synchronise with my desktop via my Synology NAS, works fine.

PB_PM

photobunny said:

Capture One being M1 doesn't mean that it can run on a iPad. The OS are very different between the iPad and macOS. Thats kinda like saying Windows apps can run on a Mac when they are both AMD64.

It’s less different than you seem to think. Both the Mac and iPad use the same programming language, and system level kernel. Native apps written in swift should not be difficult to port, the biggest job would be the new UI needed for the different means of interaction (mouse vs touch). The app maker can take core functions, like RAW processing, and port it over since it’s the same chip. Admittedly it’s easier to take an iPad app to the Mac than the other way around.

photobunny

PB_PM said:

photobunny said:

Capture One being M1 doesn't mean that it can run on a iPad. The OS are very different between the iPad and macOS. Thats kinda like saying Windows apps can run on a Mac when they are both AMD64.

It’s less different than you seem to think. Both the Mac and iPad use the same programming language, and system level kernel. Native apps written in swift should not be difficult to port, the biggest job would be the new UI needed for the different means of interaction (mouse vs touch). The app maker can take core functions, like RAW processing, and port it over since it’s the same chip. Admittedly it’s easier to take an iPad app to the Mac than the other way around.

You are partially right, but there is a lot more to be done than a UI. And it doesn't really matter how much is written in Swift, Objective C, or even C. Though does matter if some stuff is written in assembly (unlikely, but a few apps I have worked on had a couple of functions depending on libraries that are just shells for machine-specific code like that). The UI is indeed the biggest hunk of work that I can imagine here, and as I said you could probably strip out the UI, shove it into Xcode, and compile an iPad OS binary that says 'hello world'.

That assumes all of the code is modern and written in Swift (very unlikely). More likely they have to write a create a new touch focused UI and find replacements for or ditch a few libraries and some old code like Adobe has been doing with Photoshop. Even things like file management use different libraries between macOS and iPad OS.

If their app was in Swift already it honestly would be on iPad by now, I have never needed to write modern code that couldn't be compiled on ARM, Power8, and AMD64. But Capture One is an app with a lot of baggage and I fully expect they have a hard task ahead of them. Even if the big switch from OpenGL/OpenCL to Metal is complete(and M1 only which tells us something about the complexity of the codebase that they had to have a special M1 build as something is up having the Metal path work on Intel or they just didn't want to chance it.).

PB_PM

If the App is M1 native, I assume that means they have ready had to update all the code base, OpenGL to Metal, and libraries.

photobunny

They have indeed updated much of the code base but still run OpenGL only for Intel Macs. Metal is exclusively M series for them at the moment. And that just means they have updated enough of the code to compile to ARM on macOS. There are still things we can’t do on iOS even if the app is written in Swift. OS level differences are trivial for some apps and a pain in the arse for others.

PB_PM

Right. I wasn’t sure how much they had to do for M1 support. I didn’t even think OpenGL was supported in the last few Mac OS releases, all my OpenGL apps stopped working a few years ago (I don’t have an M1 device just to clarify). I guess they were all 32bit apps, rather than an OpenGL issue?

photobunny

OpenGL is still in macOS but it has been on the chopping block for years and a rather old version. 32 bit support was removed (OpenGL was supposed to be removed with it until developer revolt.). But aye, they had to rewrite a lot of the app to get it to work on M1 and part of that process made it better for everyone (including Windows), expect it still has some issues where the Metal version does not work on Intel Macs, perhaps the OpenGL path is still too heavily snaked into the code base. Mojave (10.14) is the last version of macOS with 32bit support. But even 11.4 and the 12.0 beta continue to support OpenGL.