August 26, 2009
Information about Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard
I’ve done some more research into the history of Adobe’s work with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I can’t speak for product teams besides Photoshop, and in the interests of time, I’m sharing what I’ve found out so far.
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. Here are the remaining open issues we know about:
- The blue highlight ring around PS windows displayed by Exposé is too heavy.
- When using arrow keys to nudge the values in text fields up and down, the values now change more slowly on a Japanese OS.
So, why didn’t we say all this from the beginning? Read on for details.
It has always been Adobe’s policy not to go backwards and do dot releases on software that is no longer shipping. This isn’t some kind of ploy to force people to upgrade; rather, it’s a recognition that resources are not infinite, and we need to focus our efforts on current and future technology*. When we say that we officially support a specific OS, you can trust that we’ve done very extensive testing on that platform. If we haven’t done that level of testing, then we simply won’t say that we support it. That’s why the FAQ reads as it does.
That said, none of us like to inconvenience customers, so the reality is that we *do* actually perform some amount of testing on older product if we believe that there are a significant number of customers using it. So does Apple.
As I say, we have reason to expect that all meaningful issues of running Photoshop CS3 under Snow Leopard have been resolved. However, because we have not done the level of testing that true certification demands, we need to stand by our statement that we don’t officially support CS3 on Snow Leopard.
Hope that makes sense,
* For what it’s worth, Mac users are especially familiar with these trade-offs. Apple has been among the most aggressive companies when it comes to dropping support for old tech in order to move forward. Remember the furor about the iMac having no floppy drive? I could cite many more examples (dropping Classic, PowerPC support, etc.), but you get the idea.