Apple's Lion OS breaks other people's software -

While the Tame Apple Press continues to churn out rubbish about how marvellous Mac OS X Lion is, it appears that people who are actually using it are suffering.

Apple's business market has been the creative industry, where huge chunks of its user base use Mac OS X to run Adobe products.

However more than a dozen Adobe products are not working properly, which is turning the OS into the Vista of the Mac World.

Part of the problem appears to be Steve Jobs' high profile spat with Adobe. He blamed Adobe for causing his perfect computers to crash and called for users to abandon Flash for HTML 5.

While the rest of the world uses Flash, Apple users are discouraged. Apple seems to have sat by and assumed it will win any toys being thrown out of the pram spats with Adobe.

As a result it appears that the two sides did not cooperate when it came to Apple's Lion. As a result most of Apple's Mac customers who use Adobe Photoshop, for example, can't upgrade.

It is a case where Jobs has a hissy fit and his users suffer.  Although Adobe might be upset at losing a lot of its Mac base, chances are that they will not lose any customers. It is more likely that their business managers will just not let them upgrade to the new Mac OS, meaning that it is Apple and not Adobe that suffers.

Writing in her bog, Adobe Senior Product Manager Jody Rodgers wrote that it would be a brave Mac IT admin who installed Lion.

Known issues in Lion plague Adobe software such as Acrobat, Adobe Drive, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flash Player, Lightroom, LiveCycle, Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

Flash causes higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video on Lion, the "Flash Player settings dialog does not respond to mouse clicks," and "custom native mouse cursors are not animating properly".

Adobe said that it is not going to upgrade the Flash Catalyst CS5 to work on Lion and Catalyst CS5.5 is "generally compatible". However Adobe does not recommend that Catalyst CS5.5 customers upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7. In LiveCycle, workflows that are dependent on Adobe Reader plug-in will not work with the Safari 5.1 browser.

Adobe Reader and Acrobat will continue to work as standalone applications on Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.6, and have to render PDF documents outside of the browser. Problems with Lion do not just extend to Adobe products.

According to PC World some users have been writing to forums complaining that Lion has slowed their Macs down. There certainly appears to be a problem caused by the Spotlight search function re-indexing the contents of the computer, but this will pass after the indexing is over.

But others are not so sure.  "It is like going back to the days of Apple gaming, where nothing worked" one Apple punter wrote.

It is thought that newer Macs will run Lion better than older ones. Of course, this means that countless owners of older macs will have to junk their machines, but hell, Apple still makes hardware and maybe this will encourage a few more expensive sales.  Or people might get a computer that just works, rather than only just works.

But the situation is remarkably similar to Microsoft's woes when it brought in Vista.

Owners of older machines could not run it, and software broke down, forcing many to stick to Windows XP. Having said that, Leopard was also rubbish when it first came out with its appropriately spotty performance.  Apple rushed out a patch and it was a bit better.