

Turns out CS4 is the Snow Leopard Problem Child - wookiehangover
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2216315
A forum thread documenting common, repeatable bugs in Adobe Photoshop CS4 running in Snow Leopard. If you need to use Photoshop, DON'T UPGRADE YET!
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mahmud
Hard to believe Apple wouldn't work with Adobe closely to make sure their CS
product suite works with the OS before its release! You see kids, back in the
day, Microsoft made sure the software of all their big software vendors where
working with any new version of Windows before they released it: vendors got
advance OS disks, and sometimes MS worked in close conjunction with them to
make sure none of the API they depended on were broken.

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lurch_mojoff
In other words Microsoft kept crap that could have been refactored or
implemented in a better way altogether, for the sole purpose of saving the
likes of Adobe the "effort" to have to fix their dirty hacks. Given this
helpful Microsoft attitude, one really wonders how did they get in the jam
they are in today?

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mahmud
It's not unusual for partner companies to accommodate each other, specially
when their interests are so overlapped as Adobe's and Apple's are. You say re-
factoring and I say it makes perfect business sense for Apple to make sure
Adobe's stuff works first and foremost; CS showcases the Apple platform better
than any other app suite I can think of, not only that, but it also pushes
sale of Apple products like crack. Adobe's bloated stuff sells macs, plain and
simple; it's one of the main anchors that keeps the creative and media
industries on Apple (though they could have CS on Win32 as well.)

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lurch_mojoff
For one, Adobe's tools are much less important for Apple than they used to be.
We are far from the days when the most significant market for Macs was desktop
publishing and graphic design. Apple were very smart to diversify - on the pro
side, in the last few years they have gained significant penetration in
photography, videography, music, software development and science markets, to
name a few; on the consumer side, they grew their marketshare and their
mindshare significantly - so much so in fact that I'd wager they are making
more money selling consumer level computers than pro machines. On top of that,
Mac OS X has evolved to be very nice and usable operating system and as a
result, if Adobe were to discontinue their Mac products today, there would be
a good number of creative professionals who'd rather switch software than
switch away from the Mac.

And for two, Apple have been accommodating Adobe's needs for years, with
little to no reciprocity. The sole reason for the existence of Carbon is so
Adobe and Microsoft wouldn't have to make significant changes to their
products overnight _. In return, Adobe dragged their feet with Carbonization,
the switch to OS X, the switch to x86, and now the switch to 64-bit. In the
last nearly 10 years Adobe had not put one iota effort into transitioning
their core products to Cocoa. They had put the bare minimum of effort into
optimizing their products for Mac OS X (in some cases, like the Flash plugin
not even that).

Why should Apple go out of their way to ensure compatibility with Adobe's CS,
when Adobe don't seem to care enough to test and fix things on their end?

_ (There is an apocryphal story about the reason for the rift between the two
companies - back in the early days of Rhapsody Apple had a three way meeting
with Adobe and Microsoft in which they discussed Apple's API plans and in
which Apple tried to push the two biggest software vendors to port their
products to Cocoa (née NextStep). Surprisingly, it supposedly was Adobe not
Microsoft, who although not thrilled at the idea were ready to find a
compromise, that put the kibosh on Apple's plans. They outright told Apple to
go pound sand - they didn't intend to put effort and money in such a port,
regardless of the fact that Adobe had a version of Illustrator for NextStep,
meaning they had both the expertise and the code base to do it. Therefore
Carbon.)

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wmeredith
I'm finding all these anecdotes leaving me a bit unimpressed. I installed Snow
Leopard on my home machine on Saturday, and since then I have been through two
3~4 hour work sessions with Photoshop with no trouble. (To be fair my anecdote
is no further proof of anything, I just thought I'd share for the sake of a
more complete picture.)

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aarongough
Agreed. I have to use Dreamweaver every day (so the static HTML stuff I do is
usable by our web content guys) and I'm amazed at the number of bugs that make
it through version after version. Not to mention some of the sh%&ty workflows
that they implement...

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teilo
This headline is sensationalist. There are some problems, obviously, but if it
were really that bad, then there would be a whole bunch more. I upgraded from
10.5 and CS4, and have not run into a single issue. I tried everything that
the users report in this thread as crashing Photoshop, and it's stable for me.
Not one crash.

One user reported that on a clean install with CS4, everything went smoothly.
That, to me, says some people have stuff running that is causing problems.

I had issues with system stability after the upgrade. Lot's of beachballing.
Turned out to be a kernel extension that I was using in Leopard. Hardly
surprising that a rogue kernel extension can make your system unstable. After
removing it, SL has been rock solid.

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hexley
It's hardly surprising that Adobe has problems with almost every OS upgrade, a
perousal of <http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/> will quickly show you what
garbage software it is.

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lurkinggrue
Despite problems like that it is still the best feature set out there and is
actually worth the money.

I don't care what people here will say, gimp doesn't cut it in some major
area's including things like photography and camera raw.

Gimp is darn good but missing 30% of the sort of features that make me hand
over a wudge of cash while shouting "It must be mine!"

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jdowdell
Adobe did testing across the CS4 line atop the new Apple OS. There are a few
minor issues documented... see blogs.adobe.com or individual product support
pages. Most people find it just works.

It's quite possible that someone has a minority experience, where it doesn't
work. First steps are to check the integrity of the applications (it's legit
CS4 direct from Adobe?), then any customizations to the system that may cause
it to act differently than others. It's to everyone's advantages to document
all meaningful Snow Leopard differences.

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jkmcf
In the comment stream Jeffrey Tranberry (from Adobe) is saying a new font,
Menlo, is causing at least one of the problems. How can a font cause a serious
problem?

Also, following someone's Twitter stream for information is fail when it's a
ton of @ messages.

