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Adobe's decision to release a public beta of Photoshop CS3 the other week caught everyone by surprise.

We have become used to the company making new products such as Lightroom, Soundbooth and Kuler available for download through its Labs site (labs.adobe.com), but that's an entirely different proposition from putting up the crown jewels and letting anyone with a copy of CS2 download them. OK, so it is not the finished article, and there are probably a few headline features that will not see the light of day until the final release later this year. Nevertheless, it is a big step and not one Adobe would take without a very good reason.

The company's CEO, Bruce Chizen, has always said that the Universal Binary versions of Photoshop, InDesign et al will be available when they are available. The company line is that it is sticking to its planned release schedule for CS3 and will incorporate Universal Binary versions of its constituent applications into that release.

While there is no doubting Adobe's support for Apple and its transition to the Intel platform, the company has pointed out in the past that porting its applications is not just a matter of recompiling.

Adobe must have been a little envious at Apple's WWDC conference in 2005 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs invited the CEO of Wolfram Research, maker of the heavyweight maths and science application Mathematica, on stage to demo a version of Mathematica running natively on a Mac with an Intel processor. With only 20 lines of code changed and a recompilation that took only two hours, Mathematica was ready to run natively on Macs that would not be released for another six months. That was, of course, another example of cute Jobs sleight of hand. Sure, Mathematica, and lots of other applications developed using Apple's Xcode environment, could by moved to Intel easily, but Jobs and most of the developers in the room knew that most applications were

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not written in Xcode, so would take much longer to switch.

That did not matter, as the demo was not aimed at the developers in the room: it was pitched at the media and Apple customers around the world. It was Apple's way of saying 'we know you went through a big upheaval a decade ago with the move to PowerPC, and then again with the switch to Mac OS X, but this time it will be really easy.' The developers knew the truth - that for non-Xcode applications, with lots of legacy code, the transition would be more painful.

That would not have been such a big deal had Apple not set itself a tough target for switching its entire line to Intel, and then beaten it. The result for Adobe is that its Intel-native applications will not be available until at least six months after the last Mac to sport a PowerPC processor has disappeared from Apple's production line. In PR terms, that is not good for Adobe. Neither is it good for Apple's sales - particularly of the Mac Pro.

No matter how many times those of us who have done tests tell potential buyers that even under Rosetta, Creative Suite 2 runs better on a Mac Pro than a very fast G5, there will be an understandable reluctancy to part with cash for machines that need to run critical applications under emulation.

So was it Adobe's public relations or Apple's sales that were the driving force behind the decision to make a beta of Photoshop CS3 publicly available?

Did Adobe decide its reputation would be damaged if it was seen to be too far behind its competitors (if Photoshop could be said to have any competitors) in releasing a Universal Binary? Or did a certain Apple executive with a short fuse and a persuasive turn of phrase pick up the phone to Chizen and tell him that it simply was not good enough that Mac users would have to wait until spring to run Photoshop - perhaps the most important application on the whole platform - natively on an Intel Mac? Without inside information of the kind that could earn me a fortune on Nasdaq (and then get me arrested), it is impossible to say with certainty, of course. But it is inconceivable that Jobs and Chizen have not had a conversation about the subject of Adobe's Universal Binary releases in recent months. Jobs just is not the kind of guy to sit back and wait for something to happen, particularly when it has such a profound impact on the Mac and Apple. Neither is he the kind of guy to politely enquire about when Adobe may be in a position to furnish Mac users with a new version of Photoshop.