To be or not to be: Adobe and OS X Lion
Yesterday OS X Lion was released on the Mac App Store, and has since had over a million downloads. Also yesterday was a press release by Adobe detailing the laundry list of their software incompatibilities with Lion.
I’d expect them to maintain compatibilities for at least CS5 and CS5.5 and that this would be squared up before launch considering Adobe, like every other Mac developer, has had access to the Lion beta builds for over a year already.
Four months ago I wrote a post about my doubts that Adobe will support Lion’s new features. Incidentally, yesterday’s release includes the following paragraph:
Lion has some exciting new features such as Autosave, Restore, Versioning, Full Screen Mode, and more multi-touch gestures. Since many of these features require new code in order to work properly, Adobe will investigate which ones make sense to our customers for inclusion in future versions of our products.
Translation: “Since we prefer to do things our own way rather than adhere to OS X conventions, it’s going to take lots of time and money to add support for these features.”
They are all features that all users—especially creative professionals—will love, and ultimately, based on past experience, Adobe won’t support them unless they are pushed.
John Siracusa made this point when talking about third-party support for these features in his mammoth Lion review for Ars Technica:
What I think will actually happen is that the top-tier Mac developers will quickly add support for some or all of these new features and users will start to look down on applications that still behave the “old way.” I’m sure that’s how Apple hopes things turn out, too.
Adobe certainly isn’t a ‘top-tier’ Mac developer (but they damn well should be). They should already be ‘looked down upon’ for behaving the ‘old way’, but be sure to hasten this process by actively supporting creative software that fully embraces Lion.
