Adobe Creative Suite CS3 “not tested“ to run on OS X Snow Leopard

[adam]

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 “not tested“ to run on OS X Snow Leopard with no software update plans to add support according to John Nack at Adobe John Nack on Adobe: Adobe Snow Leopard FAQ


From http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/files/A...eopard_FAQ.pdf

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software—such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Macromedia® Studio 8
software—support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)?
A. Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and
Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested,
and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore
experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution.

[Ritter]

I don't understand why anybody would find this surprising. Adobe has an almost complete monopoly on creative software with the exception of video editing. They do what they want and will continue to do what they want. This isn't any different from any other Wall-Street driven company. Adobe will satisfy shareholders in the short-term by increasing sales of current CS # while burning long-term legacy customers who have no choice but to buy their new products. Perhaps many of you don't remember how Adobe handled Apple's PowerPC to Intel shift with Adobe products?

[Tech]

Who knows, maybe when Adobe pushes CS5 to run on 64 bit only then they will bother to support Leopard 10.6. I'm not surprised they won't offer immediate support at this point... enough corporate clients complaint and they will be force to release patch for now until their 64-bit vision comes true.

Of course, alternative option is not to upgrade Leopard 10.6... I don't see how this new update will improve current work flow anyway. For personal home computer, I would upgrade but for workplace, it's best to avoid it until you know all your applications will get updates as well.

[gordo]

Since Snow Leopard is just a highly optimized version of Leopard and for the most part functionally identical to Leopard I think that many users will not update their OS.
All the applications I use work with my current OS 10.5.7, so I won't be upgrading because I don't want to risk losing the use of any of my essential applications many of which are shareware/freeware and may not be upgraded to work with SLeopard.

A good article about upgrading is here: Preparing for 10.6 Snow Leopard: Early release? Early installation? - MacFixIt



best, gordon p

[Vee]

In a production environment, prepress, I would not update the OS and maintain stability and consistency in my area.

In my past life as a prepress manager - I was rarely "up to date" with the latest OS. Who cares if the jobs are coming in and going out on time and CORRECT. Eliminate/limit the variables, and maintain consistent output.

With that said, I would always have one or two machines to test the new OS/Apps etc with, and would output jobs on a limited, and very monitored basis. When I was ready, or the workload demanded it - evaluate updating other machine(s).

You don't need the latest and greatest to be successful.

[adam]

John Nack has provided an update:

"It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard."

"Apple and the Photoshop team worked together closely during the development of Snow Leopard, as we do during the development of every OS revision. The Photoshop QE team reported a couple of dozen problems to Apple, and I'm happy to say that Apple has fixed all the significant issues we found."

More at John Nack on Adobe: Information about Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard

[Ritter]

John Nack has provided an update:
"...The Photoshop QE team reported a couple of dozen problems to Apple, and I'm happy to say that Apple has fixed all the significant issues we found."

I laughed out loud when I read that line. This implies Adobe expects the operating system to conform to their software rather than the other way around. Would it be logical for sugar farmers ask the weather in Alaska to change so that they could grow sugar cane there? Of course Photoshop realistically has zero competition and being the industry standard Adobe can dictate to Apple as a huge portion of Apple's sales are contingent on Photoshop working. It's just a bass-ackwards way of doing things that ends up holding back innovation.

I'm not anti-Adobe but I would definitely welcome some real competition in the marketplace.

[Hopkins Printing]

I laughed out loud when I read that line. This implies Adobe expects the operating system to conform to their software rather than the other way around. Would it be logical for sugar farmers ask the weather in Alaska to change so that they could grow sugar cane there? Of course Photoshop realistically has zero competition and being the industry standard Adobe can dictate to Apple as a huge portion of Apple's sales are contingent on Photoshop working. It's just a bass-ackwards way of doing things that ends up holding back innovation.

I'm not anti-Adobe but I would definitely welcome some real competition in the marketplace.

I have been caught up in the whole finger-pointing war in the past when I've had issues with Adobe products. I call Adobe, they blame Apple...I call Apple, they blame Adobe. Gets really old after a while when nobody wants to take responsibility for a problem which leaves me in the middle (and out in the cold) with no solution.

And while your point about competition is well taken (and I can agree!), the only thing I would say from a support perspective is...no no no, I don't need another program to support and figure out how to make it function in my workflow! ;-)

[almaink]

What bothers me most about this is older files that some customers may send. Not every customer is up to date and it's getting worse as the years go on. You can't turn work away and yet opening an Adobe 2.0 file in CS4 is looking for trouble. I can understand things not being backward compatible but the newest app shouldn't have issues opening up older stuff. I've been fighting this in Illustrator since version 9 now it's InDesign. Nice that Adobe updated their text engine but the application should also honer older versions without needing to update anything. Now Adobe's going one step further by telling us Adobe CS, CS2, CS3 won't even work in the new OS! So WTF we gotta keep legacy macs running again?
Remember OS9>OSX days...

[Dov Isaacs]

I certainly understand the position of a computer user who sees and suffers from the mutual "finger pointing" that occurs when a new operating system version is released and suddenly applications that were working are no longer fully functional or exhibit odd mannerisms under the new operating system software. Also, given my status as an employee of Adobe, I expect that you will certainly assume that I have parochial biases on this topic. But here goes ...

Over my long career I have not only been involved with the design, implementation, and validation of application programs, but also managed groups that designed and implemented operating systems as well as system software used in conjunction with same. In those roles, one of the cardinal rules that we followed was that new operating system versions and features were absolutely required to maintain full compatibility with existing application programs. No ifs, ands, or buts about this rule. Just because a new feature was neat, cool, ... cool, neat did not excuse the OS developer from maintaining application compatibility. Application compatibility testing was at least important as testing of new features. Anyone in my organization who knowingly violated this compatibility rule or didn't immediately resolve any such problem unknowingly introduced during development and found during our rigorous testing risked termination of their employment with our company. And I know similar attitudes and practices existed with other mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers (I was with Wang Labs at the time).

Quite frankly, it is (or at least was) very reasonable for an application program developer to assume that unless their program or installer does something very stupid (such as refusing to install or run after interogating the OS version and finding a newer version than expected), that such software should continue to run as it did previously, although perhaps not being able to take advantage of newer OS features.

Apparently, today's OS developers don't really value the stability of their operating system environments for existing applications. That's exactly what we are finding. Neat, cool, ... cool, neat eye candy seems to trump operational usefullness and compatibility.

Over the history of MacOS, forgetting for the moment the extreme costs incurred in the conversion from Motorola 68xxx processors to the PowerPC processors and then from the PowerPC to the Intel processors as well as from MacOS 9 to MacOS 10, Adobe has made tremendous investments in reprogramming and testing to simply assure that the current and next application version works on the newest MacOS dot release. Such investments have come at the expense of new feature development. Apple doesn't reimburse us for such reprogramming or the extensive compatibility testing we do for them.

In this particular case, we did not say that CS3 won't work on MacOS 10.6, but rather, we haven't officially tested it. We did extensive compatibility testing with CS4 and new versions of our software under development. Hopefully the fixing of buckets of bugs that Apple fixed as a result of such testing also help CS3 run under MacOS 10.6. It is also fairly unfortunate that Apple does not have an extensive end user beta testing program in addition to its fairly limited developer testing program. Such end user testing would better find application compatibility problems with legacy versions of applications used in the field and allow users to put pressure on Apple to fix such issues.

- Dov