Adobe to update some Creative Suite 3 apps for Leopard

Adobe said this past weekend that while many of its Creative Suite 3.0 applications are already compatible with Apple's new Leopard operating system, a handful of applications including Acrobat and its professional video offerings will require small updates for full compatibility.

Specifically, Adobe said Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, Encore CS3, and Soundbooth CS3 will each require small compatibility updates, which the company plans to release over its Adobe Updater mechanism for free this December. Meanwhile, Acrobat 8 Professional and Adobe Reader 8 will also require Leopard compatibility updates that are scheduled for release in January 2008.

"Adobe sets high standards of quality, stability, and reliability for our professional creative products, and we have worked closely with Apple to test Creative Suite 3 applications on both pre-release versions and the final shipping version of Mac OS X Leopard," the software maker wrote in Leopard compatibility FAQ document posted to its website. "While this testing showed that most CS3 applications perform well on Leopard (and that others run well but need updates for a few identified issues), we recognize that other issues may unexpectedly arise on any new operating system."

Still, Adobe said it's comfortable recommending that owners of all of its new Creative Suite 3 products install and run those products on Leopard ahead of the compatibility updates. "[O]ur testing shows that the overall experience on Mac OS X Leopard is stable and reliable and that customers will get more from running these leading Creative Suite 3 editions on Leopard than not," the company said.

In the published FAQ, Adobe also acknowledged that while some of its older Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Studio 8 products may install and run on Mac OS X Leopard, they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before the new operating system became available. Therefore, users may 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 Leopard," Adobe said. "For a complete overview of compatibility between Adobe creative applications and Mac OS X Leopard, see the chart [below]."