I recently upgraded from a PowerBook to a MacBook Pro, and used Migration Assistant to copy the applications from the PowerBook to the MBP. I wanted to find out which installed applications were PowerPC-only so I could look for updated Universal versions.
My first thought was to write an application to find them (I’m learning OS X programming at the moment and it also seemed like a good exercise). After I got my app working I discovered that I didn’t need to write it: the built-in System Profiler has a list of applications and their architectures. Oh well, writing the app was a good exercise and I learnt about an interesting undocumented function: _LSCopyAllApplicationURLs.
Anyway, here’s how to find your PowerPC-only apps with System Profiler:
- Open System Profiler (Apple menu->About This Mac, then click on More Info…)
- Click on Software->Applications in the tree in the left hand side of the System Profiler window
- Click on the Kind column heading in the applications table, then scroll down to find the applications whose kind is PowerPC
Francis Devereux 