MacRumors is reporting that the iTunes 10.5 that was seeded to developers last week during WWDC, finally offers 64-bit support. This in of itself may not make much of a difference to the end user, when using and application such as iTunes, but on a technical level, this suggests that Apple has migrated iTunes over from a Carbon app to a full fledged Cocoa app.
64-bit compatibility allows for applications to address more than 4GB of memory, which can offer some performance increases. The report claims that the reason for the delay was due to Apple’s axing of 64-bit Carbon (Carbon being an API layer between Classic Mac OS and OS X) support in 2007, which meant for there to be true 64-bit support, they were going to have to go the Cocoa (native APIs for OS X) route.
Where things begin to get a little shaky is the fact that 10.5 will run in 64-bit on Mac OS X Lion, but will run in 32-bit mode on earlier versions of Mac OS X. As for the visual layout of the application, it seems it has changed very little, other than the support for fullscreen mode, and the return of horizontal close/minimize/maximize buttons.
Image courtesy of MacRumors.
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