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A spokesperson for Adobe UK told MacUser that the company had yet to receive a final version of Apple's revamped operating system, echoing remarks made by CEO Bruce Chizen last month.

"Until a new OS actually hits the shops it can not be considered final and therefore we can not certify our software for it ," he said. "All we can say is that it will work but we can not comment on any specific timeframes."

Quark on the other hand gave a guarded assurance that QuarkXPress 7 will run happily, but promised an update to fix any problems that arise.

"Although our early tests show QuarkXPress 7.3 will run on Leopard we plan on releasing a QuarkXPress 7 update fully tested Leopard support within the next few weeks," a spokesperson told MacUser. "This will be a free update for existing users and will be available to download from the Quark website."

Other software

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developers are more confident that their applications will thrive under Leopard. Softpress has announced that it will release an update to both Freeway Pro and Express which adds compatibility with Leopard's Quick Look feature. Google has already released its update for Desktop for Mac and says that all its other products for the Mac - Google Notifier, Picasa Web Albums Uploader, SketchUp, Earth and its Blogger and Gmail widgets "will smoothly transition from Tiger to Leopard".

One piece of software that will not work under Leopard is Apple's Classic environment for PowerPC Macs. Classic was a particularly important component of early versions of OSX, as it enabled users to run applications written for earlier, pre-X versions of the Mac OS. Some will doubtless be unhappy at Classic's demise, but Apple has no words of condolence.

"Classic applications do not work on Intel processor-based Macs or with Mac OS X 10.5. Upgrade your Mac OS 9 applications to Mac OS X versions. Check with an application's manufacturer for more information,"is all that its tech support note has to say on the issue.