Oh, Adobe. There was this memo floating around last June – you may or may not have seen it, it didn’t get much press – about how this tiny computer company called Apple was going to switch their processor architecture. Not a big deal, I can understand how you could have missed it…
…but then, wait, weren’t you at WWDC? Didn’t you give a press conference shortly thereafter? It would seem that since you had a good half-year’s head start, you could have at least given the Mac community something universal to whet our appetites. Well, there’s the Lightroom beta of course, but I know I can’t wait to use it with a beachball-ridden Photoshop.
Ok, well, maybe I’m being too hard on Adobe. I understand that they have a massive number of products that they would need to transition. But in light of their announcement yesterday that we may not see Universal apps like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, and the rest until 2007, it would seem that they have been nowhere to be found during the switch. Since Adobe knows that the millions of creatives who use Macs at work would at least need Photoshop, couldn’t they at least switch one or two apps over and then give us the suite next year?
In my opinion, there is no excuse for this. Their corporate line…
"As we've refined our software development process over the years, we've generally found that the most effective way for us to support these types of changes is to incorporate this testing into our regular development cycle. This enables us to advance our technology at the aggressive pace that our customers expect, while also adding support for significant new system configurations."
…doesn’t address the fact that as one of the world’s largest and most important software houses they had plenty of advance warning to at least prepare a universal Photoshop for MacWorld. I could even understand an interim universal release sometime in the next few months. But forcing Mac users to wait until the end of this year or the beginning of the next (at which point we’ll be using Leopard) essentially sends the message that we’re not all that important. And that’s a shame.
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