Earlier today, we reported on comments from Adobe Principal Product Manager for Photoshop John Nack pointing to a new FAQ document noting that only Creative Suite 4 will be officially supported on Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system, with Creative Suite 3 and earlier versions reportedly not having been tested on Snow Leopard.
Nack has now posted an update after investigating the CS3 situation in which he reveals that Adobe and Apple actually did do extensive testing of at least Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard and found that it is in fact compatible with the new operating system.
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.
Nack notes that only two minor issues remain that his Photoshop team is aware of: window highlight rings in Expos and text field nudging in Japanese versions of Snow Leopard. But while Photoshop CS3 otherwise appears to be perfectly compatible with Snow Leopard, Adobe has chosen to not categorize it as officially supported due to the level of testing it feels would be required in order to be entirely confident in that statement.
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.
In the interest of time, Nack was able to report only on the Photoshop situation under his direct purview and was unable to investigate the status of other components of Creative Suite 3 with respect to OS X Snow Leopard.
