Running Noise Ninja on Snow Leopard with Intel Macs

Recently I migrated all the apps and documents from my PowerPC G5 to a brand-spankin' new Intel iMac machine running Snow Leopard. The setup assistant flawlessly transferred everything over the FireWire connection in about a half hour. Miraculously, everything worked including CS3 with the exception of one of my favorite Photoshop plug-ins: Noise Ninja.

The error message I got when launching Photoshop was "One or more plug-ins are currently not available on your system. For details, see Help > System Info." Upon checking the System Info, the message was "Plug-ins that failed to load: Noise Ninja NO VERSION - - from the file “/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-Ins/NoiseNinjaPlugin_MacPowerPC_2_3_2/NoiseNinja.8bf”

I assumed that the Noise Ninja version I paid for was not going to be compatible with Snow Leopard and that I was going to be shit out of luck. Actually, I went back to the site at www.picturecode.com and found an Intel Mac version of the software. I installed it and it accepted my license keycode. Problem solved.

Running Adobe CS3 on Snow Leopard

After reading the PC World article 'Adobe CS3 Purrs on Snow Leopard' I ran out and bought my copy of Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) for my Intel laptop. I came home and backed up my machine on Time Machine then unplugged the external drive before installing Snow Leopard. This way, if I find any major compatibility issues (in the next week or so) I can use Time Machine to restore back to OS 10.5. From what I understand, if Time Machine backs up your machine once Snow Leopard is installed-you might not be able to restore back to 10.5 (Leopard).

So far, I've done limited testing in Photoshop, Bridge, Illustrator, InDesign, NeoOffice, WeatherDock and Linotype FontExplorer X v. 1.2.3 (fonts auto activate). I have not had any issues whatsoever. That being said, there could be bugs buried deep within menu items that I haven't tested yet. Only time will tell.

Update: January 8, 2010. I have been using Creative Suite 3 on my OS 10.6.2 Mac for over four months now and I'm happy to say it works perfectly for me.