Well this is interesting.<p>Their FAQ[0] contains some more information, but still does not explain everything. They say <i>"however, instead of being installed on your local machine, it is running in a virtualized environment so can be accessed from any Chrome browser or Chromebook. Because this version of Photoshop is running in a virtualized environment, you open, save, export and recover files from/to your Google Drive rather than your local file share."</i><p>It would seem that they are indeed streaming the video (VNC-style). More over, space requirement is only 350MB (Photoshop is normally much bigger), and there's also this:<p><i>"If network connectivity is lost, you will need to launch a new session. A recovery folder called ‘Photoshop Recovery’ will be created in the root of your Google drive. To recover files, simply double click to open a file."</i><p>Overall, this doesn't sound good at all. If they are streaming screen "video", color correction and pixel-level precision in design is going to be tough. Photoshop seems like one of the most difficult programs to work via VNC.<p>[0]: <a href="http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq" rel="nofollow">http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq</a>
I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days.<p>It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules.<p>This is actually a concern to my freedom as well.<p>I want to own my hardware and software power. I want to run everything offline if i want to. I don't want to click "I agree" button for all the actions i am doing.<p>It also means everybody is kind of forced to use their devices how these big companies are decided to. They are selling you an apple, but they don't let you to eat it however you want.<p>I will be happy as long as they give me the option(and not to force me use cloud) to keep my hardware and software on my side.
And this is the logical conclusion of the death of the 56K baud modem. There was a prophetic (if early) contest at Sun to 'imagine the future' and the winner got a SPARCStation. As a networking guy I tried to imagine what was going to change when the 'big yellow hose' (which is what 10MB Ethernet looked like at the time) came right into your living room. And one of the things that changed was that you could work at 'home' like you did at work, which at the time was most of the stuff on a beefy server with lots of CPU + storage and just the X windows on the local machine. (this worked fine with a lot less than 10MB of bandwidth of course, but it was conceptually a 'return to mainframes' pitch)<p>The economics are pretty sweet, given the marginal cost of one additional subscriber to a cloud 'hosted' environment. Google Drive / Drop box gets the storage requirement out of the way. Company X, acquires/operates a small server farm connected with a generic 10G pipe to the 'web' (this is an off the self config at places like Switch in Las Vegas). Sign up a bunch of subscribers where you have a 'free' tier to sop up excess compute and a paid tier for folks who care enough about response times to pay for them.<p>The dependency on the network has always been troubling, but once the network is like house 'power'. so many things one does depend on the house having power available, making it a requirement becomes less and less onerous. Combined with things that make traveling with data annoying (like cross border inspections) and I can see this as the future of application level computing for a lot of things.<p>Interesting that terminals are the future once again.
For those wondering how the "streaming" version of Photoshop is implemented:<p><i>Project Photoshop Streaming is identical to the Photoshop you’d install locally with a few notable exceptions. This build can be accessed from any Chrome browser (Windows only) or Chromebook and does not require a full download and install. In other words, this is the same build of Photoshop you’d typically download and install from Creative Cloud, however, instead of being installed on your local machine, it is running in a virtualized environment so can be accessed from any Chrome browser or Chromebook. Because this version of Photoshop is running in a virtualized environment, you open, save, export and recover files from/to your Google Drive rather than your local file share. Also this Beta version of the virtualized environment does not have support for GPU consequently GPU dependent features are not yet available (coming soon). This build also does not yet support for print.</i><p><a href="http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq" rel="nofollow">http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq</a>
This is stupid. Latency (which <i>can't</i> be reduced below the speed of light without circumventing the laws of physics) is incredibly detrimental to drawing and digital painting, two of Photoshop's most popular use cases. A frame or two of lag really hurts responsiveness (a frequent concern when using a large brush on a slow PC), and network latency to nearby servers in the US starts at around 30ms and only gets worse. Client side prediction helps a lot in video games, but predicting a graphics editor basically entails having the entire editor, at which point the "cloud" is doing nothing but storing your files.<p>I will never understand why people are so obsessed with the extreme of the thin client ideal. They are a good choice in a world where the network is fast and low latency, while client devices are underpowered and expensive (VT100s in a lab with minicomputer in the next room). Meanwhile, we've lived for at least the past two decades in a world where the network (on the cellular and home broadband ends) is slow and high latency but our client devices are incredibly powerful and cheap. The period of time where this makes any sense for anyone except for proprietary software vendors that want to close off any possibility of pirating their products has long since passed.<p>The appeal of "compute clusters" for most "power user" tasks especially diminishes when you realize that shitty off-the-shelf PCs from 10+ years ago were perfectly capable of running programs that did most of same stuff as their modern versions. New functionality has been added, of course, but most of the increase in resource requirements came from selfish programming from generations of programmers that never learned how to optimize. There's no reason that a Chromebook with a cheapo ARM or low-end Intel SoC shouldn't be able to natively run a better optimized graphics program like Paint Tool Sai with CPU time/battery to spare.
No thanks.<p>A glorified X-Windows/RDP/VNC/... terminal in form of a browser.<p>I love my cores, my GPU, my hard disk, ...<p>I rather stay on my beloved island seeing the ships sailing away a certain destiny of doom.
All your pictures are belong to us.<p>(From p. 117 of the EULA: (<a href="http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/CC_EULA_Gen_WWCombined-MULTI-20121017_1230.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licens...</a>)
"All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Adobe
and its suppliers.)
Probably has something to do with the BLAST browser client that VMware is doing with chromebooks.<p><a href="http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-working-together-deliver-graphics-rich-applications-enterprise-cloud-desktops.html" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-wor...</a>
This is big news. Chrome OS now has the potential to destroy Windows.<p>It will soon run a large range of Android apps, and a good virtualization solution would mean that business applications could be written for Linux and run on any platform that runs Chrome.<p>If I was Microsoft I'd be very worried right now.
It's not clear to me why this supports only Chromebooks and Chrome on Windows. It seems like they would have had to go to the trouble to explicitly <i>disable</i> support for Chrome on Linux.<p>Are Chromebooks so different than the shipping version of Chrome for Linux?
Didn't Google show off Chrome extensions that were low-level like C code a few years back? If I remember correctly, they even showed off an in-browser image editor and video games, what ever happened with that?
My understanding is that Adobe's previous cloud offerings download the programs to your machine, where they execute locally, saving files to the cloud. Is this how Photoshop works here? Or are they doing VNC/remote desktop style access?<p>I really hope it's the former - having virtual machines / LXC instances synchronized down to the Chromebook would solve those last few use-cases. (For me, my IDE is the only thing missing from a Chromebook and stopping me using it as my primary machine).
Wouldn't it make more sense to port this to a "real" Linux first? Photoshop is often quoted as a killer app that keeps people on Windows.
It would interesting to see what happens when people start to load the server. Rendering images, and any other form of image processing, can be really heavy. On my desktop workstation it can take large amounts of processing time when working with large files.<p>IMO, this is where cloud based solutions don't work well. It would be cheaper to have your own workstation which you can count on always having access to the GPU.
Interesting - so it's Adobe's Photoshop on a VPC, but is only for Windows/Chrome.<p>Remote storage of your designs/files, remote execution, like manipulating via remote desktop/VNC, but hopefully more usable.<p>My two concerns would be a) privacy of data and b) upload/download costs/time - some of the files involved can be huge.
I wonder what "initially with a streaming version of Photoshop" actually means. In a roundabout way, this is Photoshop on Linux, which is interesting.
This is huge, no matter what kind of technology or compromises being made, it shows the acceptance and maturation of chromebooks in the general public.
It's really hard to distinguish the Chromebook on the photo from a MacBook Pro. The Chromebook designers should really come up with something of their own instead of copying Jony Ive's design for Apple if they want the laptop to have a better image than poor mans MacBook.
I wonder how it saves the file, ie. just uploading the diff, or the whole file. First would sound a lot nicer, especially when working with 1gb psd's
I have some serious doubts about the usefulness of this -- considering how long it will take to "open" a large PSD file.<p>There's also the issue of sensitive/confidential content -- Adobe is putting a very large bulls-eye on themselves. Since your PSD/etc files are being uploaded to Adobe to "open" Photoshop, they'll have to be stored there, and that is very attractive to nefarious individuals.<p>I understand that in actuality the files are stored on Google Drive, but the data itself eventually exits Google's network to enter Adobe's. I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe keeps copies around for their own convenience, eg: caching or historical metrics.
How did they move a C++ code with a GUI toolkit running an event loop from OS7? How do they weeks spent optimizing each C++ function translate to the web? Is this a complete rewrite? The technical details are mind boggling.
if you buy chromebbook you must be inherently stupid to think you will get something good out of it.
Beside stealing data there is nothing good about it.
Chromebook == trash