Today Adobe has announced that on Friday it will release a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Probably the most significant point in this release (and the driving point in our post) is the fact that it is a universal binary version allowing it to run on Mac’s with the new Intel chip, and and at the same time not forgetting about their Windows customers by supporting XP and Vista. Adobe says this is to allow a smoother transition to newer hardware platforms, namely the Mac.

“This is an exciting time for the Mac, and Adobe wanted to ease the move to new Intel-based systems with a preview release of Photoshop CS3,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. “We didn’t want to leave Windows customers out of the party, so the beta is available to everyone in the creative industry’s most passionate user community — no matter what their platform choice. We still have some surprises in store, but this beta gives customers an early chance to see the power of another great Photoshop release, optimized and tuned to run natively on the latest hardware and operating systems.”

If you are interested in trying out the new Photoshop version, you can check out the Adobe Downloads page sometime on or after tomorrow (Dec. 15th). Everyone that has or gets an Adobe.com membership account (free) can download the CS3 beta edition, but it will expire after two days. If you have a serial number from one of your CS2 product, or other similar Adobe Suites or Bundles, there is a good chance you will be able to use that to keep the CS3 beta version running longer. Also, it only comes in English but previous serial numbers from other languages will work, you will just have to work with the English version of Photoshop CS3 beta.

Adobe plans on having the final release of Photoshop CS3 available in the Spring of 2007.

Press Release [Adobe]