As most Macintosh owners are likely aware at this point, Apple's new upgrade of OSX, dubbed Snow Leopard, is coming out tomorrow. One of the biggest questions is whether or not certain applications will continue to work with Snow Leopard, most important for many being Adobe Photoshop.

The good news is that CS4 on Snow Leopard has been tested by the Adobe team, and is all good. The worry for many users however, is that CS3 versions might be impacted. However, according to Adobe's John Nack, the product manager for Photoshop, CS3 should work fine on Snow Leopard. On his official Adobe blog he writes:

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.

This should bring a sigh of relief for those of you who are planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard (I hesitate to call it SL to avoid confusion with Second Life).

Now some other bits of information. Even though Snow Leopard moves OSX to full 64 compatibility, according to reports on OS News, it will default into something called 32 bit mode which in effect, allows all 32 bit applications to run natively. This presumably will be phased out over time as more and more apps are converted to full 64 bit code, but for now it appears the transition may be fairly smooth. We shall see starting tomorrow:

Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit. By holding down the '6' and '4' keys during boot, you can to boot into full 64bit mode - that is, if your Mac supports it. As it turns out, some Macs with 64bit processors cannot use the 64bit kernel because the EFI is 32bit. Note: I should have included in the article that 64bit applications will run just fine (including benefits) on a 32bit kernel in Mac OS X. Since this was already possible in Leopard, I assumed people were well aware of that. Turns out some were not, so my apologies for that.

For the Adobe blog, click here

For OS News, click here