Mac OS X Universal Binary Support

To ensure the highest performance and flexibility, ChartDirector on Mac OS X is released in Universal Binary format. This allows ChartDirector to run natively and efficiently in both PowerPC based and Intel based Macintosh computers, and in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes.

Universal Binary is a standard format supported by Mac OS X. It is essentially a binary created by combining a PowerPC 32-bit executable, an Intel 32-bit executable, a PowerPC 64-bit executable and an Intel 64-bit executable into one file. At runtime, the Mac OS X operating system will automatically use the executable that matches its CPU architecture.

A Universal Binary is approxmiately four times the file size of a single executable. However, it does not use any more memory or affect performance, because the Mac OS X operating system only loads the executable that matches its CPU architecture.

If you are using ChartDirector in an application that does not need to support all four CPU architectures, and the increase in file size is not desirable, you may use the Mac OS X command line utility "lipo" to remove the unnecessary parts from the Universal Binary. Please refer to the Mac OS X documentation on "lipo" for more information (type "man lipo" on the command line).

(Note: 64-bit support is only available for programming languages that have 64-bit interpreters or compilers included in Mac OS X operating system.)