One day before the scheduled launch of Mac OS X Snow Leopard — the latest update of Apple’s (AAPL) flagship operating system — developers are still scrambling to make sure their applications will work with the new version.
Of the Macintosh apps than have been tested on the gold master of OS X v.10.6 as of Wednesday morning, more than 60 either don’t work or have major problems, according to snowleopard.wikidot.com, a collaborative project that is collating independent test results.
Most of the major productivity apps — Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008, Adobe (ADBE) CS4 Suite and QuarkXPress — are OK.
But there are some big exceptions, including Adobe Photoshop Elements (No. 6 on Amazon’s Mac bestseller list) and Google Gears, a Web browser extension that allows offline access to a number of popular online applications.
And users of early versions of some important programs — Parallels version 3.0, for example, or Adobe CS2 — will find they need to update their software.
Snow Leopard: The reviews are in
Among the apps on our hard drive known to have problems with Snow Leopard are Boxee, Reunion, Times Reader and Vuze. Many more, including TurboTax and SlingPlayer, are not listed as tested.
If you’re worried about your computer, you can search for your key apps on the wikidot page here (be patient, the server may be busy). Or you can follow the first rule in computer software: wait until the kinks have been worked out before installing a new OS.
UPDATE: The snowleopard.wikidot.com page is working again and has been updated. Among other changes, SlingPlayer has been tested (it works) and there’s a version of Reunion (6.0a) in development that is said to be Snow Leopard ready.
UPDATE 2: Apple has posted a support page that includes a partial list of software known not to work with Snow Leopard. Click here.