Mac OSX Snow Leopard having a bit of a Vista moment

In my mac world I tend to live in a couple major applications:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Mamp
• Flash CS4
• PhotoShop CS4
• Dreamweaver CS4
• MS Word 2008 (for Windows in Parallels)
• and OpenOffice

By far the Adobe CS4 products are my career bread and butter and I wouldn't (couldn't) give them up if I wanted to.

At the moment Apple is really pushing anyone with a Mactel (Mac computer running on the Intel architecture) to upgrade to OSX 10.6 a.k.a Snow Leopard. How are they pushing? Like a drug dealer with blowout pricing. If you've recently purchased your mac, you can upgrade for $10. And if you didn't recently purchased it, then the upgrade costs $30. For me, that would mean $30 for my Macbook Pro and another $10 for the iMac.

But here comes the Vista moment (or maybe it isn't Vista as much as it is an old-mac-moment.) Snow Leopard made a number of core changes to how stuff works in the system but boasted that any of the current apps that we running fine under OSX 10.5.x should run fine in Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, that isn't proving out to be true. People like myself who live in the CS4 applications are currently encountering so many blowups that the forums are in flames. If you are running CS3 then you might as well boot up your old Windows XP machine, because if you upgraded to Snow Leopard then it is going to be a while before Adobe gets around to helping you out.

Adobe has been saying that they tested CS4 and it is good to go, but that Adobe CS3, while important to the company, isn't getting the priority at the moment. People still using CS3 got a little heated about that and started accusing Adobe of abandoning CS3 as a result, but Adobe assured them that it is just a prioritization issue and they will be getting around to ensuring CS3 works on Snow Leopard soon enough. Little did we all know that the reality about CS4 compatibility with Snow Leopard was more of an issue than Adobe was letting on. In fact, it now appears that Adobe new there were issues and the reason they weren't focusing on getting CS3 up to speed on Snow Leopard had everything to do with the fact that they can't yet get CS4 running smoothly on Snow Leopard.

But it isn't just Adobe products. There seem to be reports of intermittent issues doing regular stuff like "opening" or "saving" file. Hello!? What else does one do on a computer?

Rest assured, I am certain Adobe and Apple will resolve this current nightmare full-stop, but in the mean time I am waiting for some funny counter-strike style Microsoft commercials that mock Snow Leopard's buggieness. "Hello, I'm a PC. And I'm a ma... Hello, I'm a ma... and I'm a...I'm sorry but a number of system plugins are not responding. Please, visit help > system to view the... hello, and I'm a mac."

I will not be upgrading too quickly. I am sure I will upgrade, but just not as fast as the gotta-have-it mac-fan-boys across the interweb that were quick to regurgitate the Apple marketing on Snow Leopard even though Apple seems to have been less open than ever in allowing news firms to get access to Snow Leopard for pre-launch reviews.