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JonoMarshall · Sep 19, 2007, 07:35 AM

Saw this on another forum:

As some of us actually pay (a lot) for our copy of CS3 -as opposed to downloading it from a torrent site- there's an interesting, if rather speculative article on tuaw.com about the current state of Adobe's flagship suite on Leopard. The gist of it, is that Adobe's CEO has hinted to Reuters that things might not be going that smoothly with regard to OS X 10.5.

It might be total bullshit, but some of the follow-up comments are interesting. One example that caught my eye:

"I have access to a Leopard seed and have the full compliment of CS3 apps (well the Designer pack + Fireworks) and can confirm that they do indeed run like grade A crap. Numerous problems as reported to Apple have been:

• Random crashes in all CS3 apps
• Input box problems and sliders do not work properly in all CS3 apps
• You canot run Photoshop for longer than 20 minutes before it either crashes on you or causes your Mac to stall and even the simplest tasks like nudging a layer cause the spinning beach ball of death.
• Flash has serious display issues when looking at more than one document.
• Various save problems in Illustrator and problems when opening more than one document (two windows open, can't close the first one)."

The speculation is that Adobe are making some of this public, to give Apple a kick up the ass on behalf of third-party developers, and to basically say "our software is actually more important than yours". Apparently Apple haven't been that helpful lately to software developers. Although I'm not always a fan of Adobe as a company, they do have a point. In the pro-market it's CS3 that really rules the roost. I'd just as soon switch back to Windows if there were ever serious (and prolonged) problems with the Mac OS version. Or at the very least not bother with the 10.5 upgrade.

At the very least I think it's worth advising to hold off on the Leopard upgrade (if you were planning to jump on it quickly) until the stability and performance of CS3 has been well documented.

Is there any weight to this?

gooser · Sep 19, 2007, 07:45 AM

well, you can't say you haven't been warned.

MacosNerd · Sep 19, 2007, 07:56 AM

Is there any weight to this,
of course there is.

For what ever reason (could be valid reasons) have felt they did not have sufficient time with the the Leopard betas to indicate that CS3 will be problem free. Does it mean it won't run, probably not but it means there may be problems in some tasks in some of the programs. CS3 is a massively complete suite of applications and it takes a fair amount of effort to update them.

Personally I'll probably go out and buy leopard the first day its available but if cs3 doesn't do what I expect it too, then 10.4 will have to be reloaded. I'm cautiously optimistic that it should be fine.

Chuckit · Sep 19, 2007, 09:43 AM

I find the claim that Apple hasn't been all that helpful strange. From what I've heard, Adobe is one of the companies that Apple goes out of its way to help. And most independent developers seem to feel Apple is pretty nice to them as well. Can't comment on the rest of it, but I just find that kind of odd.

Dakarʒ · Sep 19, 2007, 09:46 AM

I hope this doesn't apply to CS2 as well.

Chuckit · Sep 19, 2007, 10:00 AM

The rumor (or whatever you want to call it) is very specific about CS3. I'd already heard that CS2 worked all right, so that makes sense.

CatOne · Sep 20, 2007, 12:19 AM

First, Adobe corrected Chizen's statement, or rather clarified it. The fact is that Adobe can't test on a final version of Leopard today. Because a final version of Leopard isn't available from Apple -- either to beta testers or to anyone. Which means that, while Adobe can test, they can't test with a FINAL version of Leopard. So there may be some bugs they find, which Apple fixes, and there could be other things that crop up that they DON'T find in their current build that could show up later.

So Adobe needs some time to test with the final version of Leopard so they can run ALL their QA tests and work around any issues they have. And they can't do this until Apple gets them a final build. I don't know when Apple is going to GM Leopard (and how long it takes from GM until they ship it and let people buy it at retail), but unless they get Adobe a FINAL copy say 4 weeks before GM (very unlikely), Adobe won't be able to fully certify CS3 on Leopard until after Leopard ships. So there may be a month or so when people are running in an unsupported configuration.

As for 3rd party reports from users who are either stealing Leopard betas or are breaking their NDAs... well... news. Beta software can be buggy. And with as many engineers as Apple has, and with the last seed release of Leopard being released what 4 weeks ago now... it's certainly possible that hundreds if not THOUSANDS of bugs have been fixed in the interim. We can hope that 10.5 when it ships is 100% bug free... but I think practically on a project that large... it's not possible.

alex_kac · Sep 20, 2007, 12:45 AM

To clarify - a "Final" copy *is* GM. So what you mean is a GM copy before distribution. From what I've read on the non-NDA dev group forums, Leopard is turning out to be a godsend programming wise. So if CS3 breaks so heavily, its an Adobe issue not Apple's in the development sense only. Obviously its Apple problem that the most used professional suite breaks badly on their new OS, but they shouldn't add workarounds in their code for buggy apps.

TETENAL · Sep 20, 2007, 02:52 AM

Originally Posted by JonoMarshall

Adobe's CEO has hinted to Reuters that things might not be going that smoothly with regard to OS X 10.5.

So Adobe's CEO was violating the NDA? That story is kind of hard to believe.

Don Pickett · Sep 20, 2007, 12:45 PM

Originally Posted by JonoMarshall

• Random crashes in all CS3 apps
• Input box problems and sliders do not work properly in all CS3 apps
• You canot run Photoshop for longer than 20 minutes before it either crashes on you or causes your Mac to stall and even the simplest tasks like nudging a layer cause the spinning beach ball of death.
• Flash has serious display issues when looking at more than one document.
• Various save problems in Illustrator and problems when opening more than one document (two windows open, can't close the first one)."

So, in other words, CS3 runs as poorly in 10.5 as CS2 in 10.4?

All snark aside, I am always a bit suspicious about comments from Adobe lately, given their increasingly worsening track record with their own Q&A.

imitchellg5 · Sep 20, 2007, 12:48 PM

I've used CS3 quite well in Leopard. The newer builds of Leopard work much nicer with CS3 now. During the early builds, CS3 wouldn't even launch right. And CS2 does work at 100% as far as I can tell.

Chuckit · Sep 20, 2007, 12:56 PM

Originally Posted by CatOne

First, Adobe corrected Chizen's statement, or rather clarified it. The fact is that Adobe can't test on a final version of Leopard today. Because a final version of Leopard isn't available from Apple -- either to beta testers or to anyone. Which means that, while Adobe can test, they can't test with a FINAL version of Leopard. So there may be some bugs they find, which Apple fixes, and there could be other things that crop up that they DON'T find in their current build that could show up later.

This sounds like the kind of nonsense rationalizing that students do to convince themselves they should go out drinking rather than study for the test coming up. The fact is, nobody else seems to be having this issue. I would posit that the problem here is Adobe.

CatOne · Sep 20, 2007, 08:14 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

This sounds like the kind of nonsense rationalizing that students do to convince themselves they should go out drinking rather than study for the test coming up. The fact is, nobody else seems to be having this issue. I would posit that the problem here is Adobe.

Uhh... okay.

CatOne · Sep 20, 2007, 08:16 PM

Originally Posted by alex_kac

To clarify - a "Final" copy *is* GM. So what you mean is a GM copy before distribution. From what I've read on the non-NDA dev group forums, Leopard is turning out to be a godsend programming wise. So if CS3 breaks so heavily, its an Adobe issue not Apple's in the development sense only. Obviously its Apple problem that the most used professional suite breaks badly on their new OS, but they shouldn't add workarounds in their code for buggy apps.

Well okay, yes GM in the sense of "golden master." Obviously, when using physical distribution (i.e. boxed copies), it takes time to take the final version of something and to get CDs or DVDs manufactured, boxed, and shipped to retail locations. In some cases with enough planning this lag could be as little as 1 week, but that would be pretty extraordinary. 2-4 weeks is more common. But I bet Apple has the system down so it won't take 4 weeks :-)