my understanding is that Adobe is now giving the Organizer rather than Bridge to the PSE Mac aficionados. Your thoughts, please!
That's correct. Organizer will be included in the Mac versions of both Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9. FYI, this is the first time that Premiere Elements will be available on the Mac. It would appear that Adobe is intent on providing a comparable experience and tool set on both platforms.
When Bridge was released with the Mac version of Photoshop Elements, there were a lot of questions about the future directions and possible divergence of the PC vs Mac platform offerings. I guess we now have an answer. Organizer appears firmly attached to the consumer product line. Bridge is associate with the professional/enthusiast Creative Suite market. And Lightroom appears to be targeting the professional/enthusiast photographer.
Bridge was easiest to deliver on the Mac platform initially because Adobe already had a Mac version available. Organizer, on the other hand, was firmly rooted on the PC -- it was built around the Microsoft Jet database engine and there was no previous Mac codebase to work from. To go to the Mac Platform, Adobe had to switch to a more platform neutral database engine (which they did in a previous version) and port the code to a development platform that could generate the Mac and PC executables and write the Mac specific code. That's a lot of work.
