Those of you who have gotten into the habit of badgering Adobe on an hourly basis via email, phone call, or belligerent personal appearance about the lack of a Mac OS X-native version of Photoshop may soon have to find a new hobby. Faithful viewer Greg Lindley tipped us off to an allegedly leaked PC Advisor review of Photoshop 7.0 which was supposed to have been embargoed until the product's official release-- this coming Monday. Links to HTML and PDF versions of the article posted by MacNN might be dead by broadcast time, but the text still appears in a MacRumors forum thread courtesy of faithful viewer evildead. If it's legit, we won't have much longer to wait before we're all pushing pixels sans Classic.

Note, however, that we said "if." We have no particular reason to doubt the legitimacy of that article; it reads like what it purports to be, it's not attributed to one "I. P. Freely," it's not rife with misspellings and swear words, etc. But it definitely strikes us as a tad askew that Adobe would choose to announce the release of what is possibly the most eagerly-awaited version ever of its most important application next week-- right after Seybold closes. After all, right this second there are scads of creative professionals from all over the world crammed into the Javits Center, representing pure, concentrated Eager Customer for this product. Why the heck would Adobe want to wait until those rubes scatter back to their domiciles before saying, "oh, yeah... folks, we've also got this new version of Photoshop, here"?

Then again, any company that could demo a quick and dirty Carbonized version of Photoshop 5 (yes, 5!) back in May of 1998, comment on how quick the Carbonization process was, and then not ship a final product until two product revisions and nearly four full years later-- not to mention almost a full year after the release of Mac OS X itself-- is presumably operating according to a logic that does not resemble our Earth logic. So heck, maybe Adobe really is planning on shipping Photoshop 7.0 on Monday. But if you'd feel better about a slightly less bizarrely-timed release date, look no further than Think Secret, who claims that Photoshop 7.0 actually isn't slated for shipment until next month. So if Adobe doesn't make a big announcement to the Seybold masses some time this week, March might be a more reasonable ship date to which you can cling.

Either way, it sure sounds like a Carbonized Photoshop is finally just around the corner. Of course, what this really means is that, as early as Monday, Adobe will cease to be the Mac OS X Laggard poster child and suddenly the entire creative Mac community will turn the full force of its spaceborne Flaming Complaint Ray™ onto the nice people at Quark Incorporated. Ahhhh... Change is refreshing, isn't it?