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.

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?

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.)

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.)

It worked for an extremely long time.

It's causing them problems now, but it's the basis for their successes.

So overall it was the right thing to do. (Despite, me, and every programmer who hears about it, cringing at the idea.)

For way, way more on the topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html and for the gritty specifics of many of the hacks: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/

Apple supplies pre-release OSX builds to partners and provides some level of developer support. I'd be more than surprised if Adobe weren't (first-tier) members of that programme. On the other hand, being slow to support new platforms sounds right up Adobe's street.

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.)

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...

True, the anecdotal evidence seems to be limited to certain hardware. Overall though, this is a huge blow to the users that it effects because it makes Photoshop almost impossible to use in a production environment.

Given that there's a finite range of Apple hardware that Snow Leopard is even compatible with, one would think that testing for repeatable bugs like this would have started months ago--and finished before Adobe signed off on CS4 for use with Snow Leopard.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.