I assume that the development departments for WIN and MAC communicate with each other.
I assume that in the whole programming environment the information for menus/submenus/sliders etc. is available.
I assume that there are translation tables for the different languages.
I assume that the respective contents in the translation tables are checked by native speakers.
I assume that when changes are made in one of the MAC/Win versions, all the points I have listed above are cross-checked.
I assume that information from this forum, such as Franky’s list, will be taken seriously and added to ToDo lists.
I assume that there will always be differences due to the different operating logic, which simply cannot be resolved.
I assume that DXO could also make these tables available to users who are willing to help. It’s not secret information, but it would be quicker to check without always having to switch between German and English, for example.
But maybe I’m just too gullible and naive.
And I always find it remarkable how the forum tries to do tasks that should actually be common with a purchase software.
This auto-zoom is (sadly) now the case on Mac as well, as of 6.3 (I think it was).
Otherwise, here are a couple more:
PL Win creates a virtual copy when it finds a dop file that differs from info it has in its database, while PL Mac doesn’t. The copies are really unhelpful since it makes moving back and forth between Mac and Win quite painful unless you empty the PL database before each start on Win; otherwise you have to clean up all of these unwanted copies image by image.
The support for DCP profiles is OS-specific since the absolute paths are written into the dop file. It’s even host-specific unless you maintain the same paths on different hosts. This seems to have been broken since the start (PL2), but it makes DCP profiles unusable if you use both Mac and Win, unless you want to manually hack dop files to correct paths.
The differences don’t bother me as much as the incompatibilities: I should be able to move back and forth between Win and Mac without discovering that soft-proofing has been enabled, or that color labels have been read differently, or that I can’t open an image because a DCP profile has been used, or that shot-date displays as edited on one platform, to name a few I’ve run into lately.
I have a hard time seeing DxO getting a handle on all the differences though, since it seems to be two completely different implementations by two separate teams, and new differences are still being released. I’ve had a much smoother experience with the other editors I use on both Mac and Win.
Here is the difference between the Mac and Windows versions of Photolab 5 regarding how edits can be undone. The way Windows works is preferable (for myself at least) - the Mac implementation of Undo (when undoing an accidental edit to a selection of images, then unselecting them, then reselecting them to try and bulk Undo) has cost me a lot of time in the past.
Not only the preferences menu, but menus and shortcuts in general. For example, right-click on an image in PhotoLibrary and you get quite a different menu on Mac and Win, with things in different orders and nested differently. Do the same in Customize and you don’t get a menu at all on Mac while you do on Windows. Export to disk on Mac is Command-K, on Win it’s Ctrl-Alt-P; Grid view is G on Mac, Ctrl-G on Win; etc, etc.
Interesting, I’ve only known Ctrl-Alt-P since that’s what the menu says. When I look now I see that Ctrl-K is listed in the second column under Help → Shortcuts.
Hear, hear. It’s much better that PhotoLab function as a Mac native app on Mac and as a Windows native app on Windows, than as an indeterminate Java-like platformless, non-descript ugly duckling on both.
I think the DxO is doing a great job maintaining a common engine and common codebase dual platform app while giving PhotoLab the look, feel and experience of a native Mac app.
Performance rocks as well. I recently took the latest Nikon NX Studio for a test drive on an M1 Max. It’s free and based on the mature SilkyPix codebase, but my goodness was it slow doing almost everything. My test drive ended up much shorter than I planned as my images looked so much better in PhotoLab and processing was so much faster. Of course, if there was no alternative, I could make NX Studio work as a RAW developer with finishing Affinity Photo.
But it did make me more grateful for what DxO have achieved. As @mwsilvers says, my images have been better since I discovered PhotoLab and it’s been faster and easier to arrive at those good results.