Adobe: CS4 OK for Snow Leopard; CS3 maybe, maybe not

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 27 August 2009 06:36

Opinion and Analysis

If you're not a pro and you can't afford the CS4 upgrade, maybe the stopgap answer is to spend well under $A200 on an external hard drive and install Leopard and CS3 on that. Then you can upgrade the main system to Snow Leopard and use that for the rest of your work.

(It's times like these that you wish the Mac OS X licence allowed for use under virtualisation.)

The whole issue of application compatibility with new operating system versions is moot.

Vendors need to make sure that the current major versions of their software works with the latest operating system(s), otherwise they're unlikely to make any fresh sales.

Small vendors tend to be very responsive in this way, largely because their small size helps them stay agile - bureaucratic project management, Q&A and marketing practices don't get in the way. But there are some bad examples: I'm still waiting for a certain piece of software from a small vendor to be updated to run on 10.5, yet 10.6 arrives tomorrow! My enquiries have gone unanswered, so I've almost given up on the promise of free updates.

But what responsibility does a vendor have when it comes to updating old versions to work with new operating system releases?

Some people feel that the previous version should also be made to work, largely on the grounds that it is not very old. I have mixed feelings about this.

While I agree that bugs should be fixed in version n-1 (and that security-related issues should be addressed back to n-2 as a minimum), an incompatibility with a new operating system can't really be described as a bug unless it results from the use of OS functionality that had already been depreciated.

On the other hand, if a developer doesn't keep faith with customers by ensuring that n-1 works with the latest operating system, there's a chance those customers will look elsewhere rather than update. Presumably Adobe feels that competition for Creative Suite is so weak that it can ignore that risk.

You could argue that OS updates shouldn't break applications at all. But Apple doesn't seem hugely concerned with backward compatibility, so the rest of the Mac ecosystem has to live with that.