Adobe Systems announced yesterday that it is not going to release its current applications as Universal Binaries any time soon. The Adobe applications can be run under Rosetta for the time being, as Adobe focuses on delivering native support for the Intel Macs with the next major version release of its software.

"This applies to Adobe Creative Suite 2, Studio 8, as well as individual applications, such as Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, and After Effects 7.0," the San Jose, Calif.-based software developer said in a statement. "Instead, we are focused on delivering the next versions of these products as Universal applications that will run natively on the new Intel-based Mac computers."

The company did not give any clear date, but pointed to its track-record or putting out a major upgrade once every 18-24 months. This is really bad news as it might very well mean as late as 2007. Adobe Creative Suite 2.0 was released in April of 2005 while Flash was updated in August of 2005 so 18-24 months might mean towards the end of 2007 for some of the products.

In its own defense from the consumer dissatisfaction that was bound to ensue, Adobe argues that the transition is a complicated process that requires exhaustive testing because compatibility issues can appear anywhere throughout the entire functionality of the application, and that the timeline is no different than the one in the days of the OS 9 - OS X transition.

"As we've refined our software development process over the years, we've generally found that the most effective way for us to support these types of changes is to incorporate this testing into our regular development cycle," the company said. "This enables us to advance our technology at the aggressive pace that our customers expect, while also adding support for significant new system configurations. In the first 18-24 months after Mac OS X (10.0.0) shipped, we re-engineered a dozen or more applications to run natively on Mac OS X as part of the natural release cycles of those products," the company said. "This disciplined approach allowed us to ship reliable, feature-rich releases on a new platform that served our customers well."