Adobe won't support CS3 on Snow Leopard – UPDATED

Update: Nack has now said that Photoshop CS3 is compatible – at the very least.

Adobe has confirmed that its applications are for the most part compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, while also warning it has not tested the new OS with previous generations of its professionally-priced Creative Suite products.

John Nack’s blog reveals, “Apple and Adobe have worked closely together (as always with new OS releases) to test compatibility.

"As for Adobe Creative Suite 4 , everything is good with the exception of auto-updates to Flash panels (which I guarantee you’re not using) and Adobe Drive/Version Cue (which doesn’t work at the moment on 10.6). CS3 & earlier haven’t been tested.”

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium is a relatively recent release which caused some of Nack’s readers to question the company’s testing methods. Answering these complaints, Nack states: “I’d frankly be shocked if people at Adobe & Apple really hadn’t tested CS3 on 10.6. I *think* it’s just some corporate conservatism at work here, and Adobe doesn’t want to over-promise anything. As I say, though, I’ll try to find out more.”

However, Adobe’s tech support briefing warns: “You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).”

The company does however promise available trial versions of its software will be compatible with Snow Leopard.

Adobe recently confirmed future versions of the Creative Suite will run only on Intel-based Macs.

UPDATE: John Nack has now updated his original blog, saying "No one said anything about CS3 being ‘not supported’ on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation."

We do note the problem when allocating resources at one of the world’s biggest software developers, but we also note the commitment in Adobe’s tech support briefing which said when we looked, "Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6)." This suggests if Snow Leopard causes any unexpected problems, Adobe at this time doesn’t plan to address them. We’ve a feeling a lot of creative shops running older Macs and older installations of Adobe’s creative apps will be somewhat frustrated at this, as they have been each time Adobe has been recalcitrant in similar matters in the past.