My take on the Apple switch. It looked as if PowerPC was making headway - it's a great chip architecturally, way better than Intel processors in my opinion (remember we come from an ARM RISC background so PowerPC RISC is sort of similar). It has 128 bit wide registers and lots of them, SIMD instructions etc that means a PowerPC optimised Xara drawing engine could be awesome.

What's more with Microsoft moving to PowerPC for the next Xbox (three 3.2GHz PowerPC processors, each dual cored), the Cell chip in the Sony Playstation also being based on PowerPC core, it looked as if PowerPC might make some real headway. So we had been doing some research into how we might create PowerPC versions of our rendering engine.

And then, just as the world seems to be moving to PowerPC, Apple go and switch to Intel. I was stunned and it's sort of sad really. Having worked on every processor from the Zilog Z80 onwards, the 6502, 68000 and ARM of course - each of which has at one time threatened Intel's dominance. Apple were the only PC manufacture standing out against the Intel architecture, and now they have succumbed. So history is being made. The 30 year PC processor war has finally been won by Intel. OK other processors with have a niche - PowerPC in Games machines, ARM in phones and PDAs, but not on the desktop.

The good news is that, yes, we can use our assembly optimized rendering on Intel based Macs. I should perhaps mention the internal architecture of Xara X was always designed to be platform independent (a bit like the secret life of OS X, always being platform independent). Xara Studio (the original version) was designed to be ported to Mac, Acorn or other platforms - it's just that we never got around to do doing them (Acorn died, and 1995 Apple seemed doomed, after Jobs had gone) so it seemed not commercially sensible. And of course the rendering engine was Intel assembly language.

It's not a trivial amount of work by any means, to create Linux or Mac versions. There is quite a lot of user interface code that is Windows specific, but it does mean it's a more realistic possibility that a Mac version of Xara X could now be created.