Adobe CS3 due in Q2 2007

Adobe today said that users can expect the release of Adobe Creative Suite 3 -- the first Intel-native version of the professional graphics suite -- in the second quarter of 2007. Minimizing the impact of the delay and defending its decision, Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen earlier this week said that customers were looking for new features and that Apple's large customers would be slow to migrate to Intel-based Macs -- likening the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Chizen today told Forbes.com that the company expects to release the next major version of the suite next year, after it releases its flagship Acrobat software in December. "Creative Suite 3 will be introduced in the second quarter of 2007. Acrobat will take advantage of the Macromedia assets. And you'll see a lot of activity in the CS3 launch." Earlier this year, the company noted that the release could be up to one year away.

Chizen also said that there would be a lot of integration between Macromedia's and Adobe's products and that the value of the two companies will be clear following the launch of CS3. Earlier this year, the company said that it would not deliver Universal Binary versions of its applications until the major release of each application, although it did release an Intel native version of Lightroom, a beta version of its professional application for photographers that competes with Apple's recently released Aperture.

Xcode not enough for Photoshop
An Adobe engineer recently blogged about the prospect of updating Photoshop CS2 to offer native support on Intel Macs, but said that Apple's Xcode development software is not yet able to handle large applications sufficiently.

"Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don't yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well."

The engineer added that because Adobe is so far along on its CS3 release, it wouldn't make sense to spend time porting over the old code which would require both development software that can handle a large application -- which Apple has yet to provide -- and a major reworking of the code that handles the "heavy lifting," which previously relied on plugins to optimize performance for PowerPC-based Macs.

by MacNN Staff