The Flash makers are telling customers to bang on Apple’s door for a fix

Jul 1, 2010 09:45 GMT  ·  By

Mac OS X 10.6.4, the fourth maintenance and security update Apple rolled out for Snow Leopard, seems to be giving headaches not only to gamers, but also to users of Adobe’s Photoshop CS5 and After Effects CS5. A series of potentially OpenGL-related issues are cited by the Flash makers who encourage customers to ask Apple to fix it. Question is, why doesn’t Adobe do the talking as a favor to its faithful customers?

A report by Apple Toolbox points out to the irony lying in Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.4 release notes, which state that the update specifically addressed an issue that “may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications from opening.” The source then includes a few quotes from relevant forums and Adobe employees, starting with Apple Discussions poster martinmitch, who reportedly wrote: “Photoshop CS 5 Extended was working really well but now freezes after opening a couple of images, sometimes breaking into crazy pixel pattern after updating to OSX 10.6.4 this morning. Samsung screen develops snow type pixel effect.”

A similar post, this time over at Adobe’s forums, comes from user qazwsx$4, who claims that “Photoshop keeps crashing on me every time after a couple minutes of use. This only started happening after I updated to OS X 10.6.4, anyone know whats up?”

In response to this, and many other complaints on the company’s forums, an Adobe employee stated: “That crash just started appearing yesterday with the delivery of MacOS 10.6.4.  (I found unknown crashes moving up the statistics earlier today and had engineers looking at them before lunch)  It is related to OpenGL, and probably to a driver update delivered with 10.6.4. [...] you can either tell Apple that 10.6.4 introduced this problem, or just wait for us to document it and ask Apple to fix it and eventually get a fix in the next OS patch.”

A second Adobe staffer reportedly chimed in to say, “we don’t have a complete picture yet. It looks like it may be card/OpenGL specific – like a change in the driver. We’re still investigating.”