18 ms·

Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

368 points by zastrowm 12y ago

sgarrity 12y ago
I wonder what "initially with a streaming version of Photoshop" actually means. In a roundabout way, this is Photoshop on Linux, which is interesting.
- jdjb 12y ago
  This is a web application version of Photoshop. Nothing more (and it should run on any OS with a modern browser).
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    No, it isn't ;)
  - taude 12y ago
    Are you sure? It sure sounds like this is a version of Photoshop, running in a managed VM in the cloud by Adobe.
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      The client is still Chrome, though.
justinsb 12y ago
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? 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).
- quite 12y ago
  So, it is the latter you prefer? -- VNC/remote desktop
  - justinsb 12y ago
    No, I want the virtual machine to run on my Chromebook. And it sounds like that is what they're doing!
    - thefreeman 12y ago
      No, they specifically say that if your internet connection is terminated you will need to reconnect and restore your session. It is a virtual machine running in the cloud and you are VNC'ing in from your browser.
- ethomson 12y ago
  The current version of Creative Cloud is really just a different license; indeed you do still download (say) Photoshop, it just pings the Adobe servers to ensure that you have paid your monthly or annual licensing. To call it "the cloud" is really in name only, as it's no different than the Photoshop that you pay a one-time fee for and install from DVD. This is totally different, as you suggest, it's a VNC-style access for Photoshop. (Since there is no Photoshop for Linux.)
  - wldcordeiro 12y ago
    Really the cloud offering in the name applies to their storage (20 GB as individual, 100 GB as a business account [1 TB should be standard at this point imo]), Typekit and Kuler. The applications, like you said are pretty much the same as always with full local installations.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      But this suggests Adobe might move to remote execution SaaS at some point in the next few years. I wouldn't be surprised if that's always been the ultimate goal of CC. A lot of SaaS is waiting for faster broadband. CC Saas will be limited at 10MB, but as speeds creep up to 100MB and beyond it's going to start making more sense. I think the rent-your-cycles model sucks for users, and is against everything personal computing was supposed to do. But it's a no-brainer for corporates with a captive audience for life, zero piracy, and easy surveillance.
deleted 12y ago
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arscan 12y ago
For those wondering how the "streaming" version of Photoshop is implemented: 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. http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq
- bshimmin 12y ago
  I'm pretty excited to see how utterly wretched the performance will be!
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    Yeah, all those people who bought chromebooks for their bleeding edge performance will be really upset.
  - andybak 12y ago
    If you can play an FPS remotely (and I have - and it works) then I think this is a walk in the park.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Yeah, low-latency streaming using x264 was solved in 2010. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249
    - ANTSANTS 12y ago
flixic 12y ago
Well this is interesting. Their FAQ[0] contains some more information, but still does not explain everything. They say "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." 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: "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." 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. [0]: http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  I don't see pixel-level precision being hard. As for color-correction, I would bet they have settings to allow you to adjust based on your monitor.
  - flixic 12y ago
    Doing color correction based on monitor colors would be impossible: sometimes you adjust, for instance, RGB curves for one specific layer. It could mean that half of the screen is changing with every step of the slider, and you want exact color, immediately.
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      I think you're making this overly complicated. For one, doing client-side color correction (for example with WebGL) is technically possible. It's probably not in this solution, but let's not use words like "impossible" unless they're actually impossible. But more importantly, I think you're just complaining about latency, but then you're using the phrase "impossible." EDIT: I thought you were talking about gamma correction and the color space of the display, where the program running on the server wouldn't know about the gamma and color characteristics of the monitor on your current browser. Thus, "monitor settings." But no, you're just worried in general about whole-screen fill rate latency. Again, I think using terms like "impossible" is hyperbole. It will be fine for some users, and not for others.
ethomson 12y ago
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 disable support for Chrome on Linux. Are Chromebooks so different than the shipping version of Chrome for Linux?
- sheetjs 12y ago
  > Streaming Photoshop can be run on any Chromebook or Chrome Browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that they disable support for chrome on linux. It's possible that it can run on Chrome for Linux but Adobe won't necessarily provide support in the same way that they provide support for the Windows version.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    That's probably the main reason. It's too bad though because it would be great to have it available on linux, even in an unsupported offering.
    - zfran 12y ago
      chances are that once it comes out someone will hack it/reverse it to "run" on a standard Linux setup
- dandroid1 12y ago
  Probably just heavy collaboration with Google, and Google wanting to push Chromebooks.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  ChromeOS is gentoo linux. I consider this a Photoshop port. :-)
whizzkid 12y ago
I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. 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. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. 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. 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. 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.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  Except you don't own most software you have on your machine locally. You agree to a license to use it.
  - whizzkid 12y ago
    "I want to own my hardware and software power" I think this states what I am trying to say.
    - wffurr 12y ago
      The parent is specifically addressing that point. You don't own most of the software you are purchasing. The vendor retains either the technical or legal ability to reach into your machine and disable the software via the licensing agreement.
      - whizzkid 12y ago
        I understand the point, which is really reasonable. But how about this way; In order to disable the software that I installed on my machine, they need to know who I am, which computer it is installed to, plus lots of other procedures to deal with. Which is time consuming and not easy. In order to disable cloud hosted software, - User.find(me).licence.valid = false
jiggy2011 12y ago
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.
- TkTech 12y ago
  CS6 already has gold status under Wine, works quite well. They could "port" it to Linux just by wrapping it in a Wine container and fixing a few bugs, much like gog does with games (using both Wine & dosbox)
- kevind23 12y ago
  Well, it's being ported to run in a virtual environment, not necessarily even Linux :/
- rozap 12y ago
  Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Apple or Microsoft were paying Adobe large sums of money to not do that.
dochtman 12y ago
This would have been more interesting if they'd ported Photoshop to asm.js, or even NaCL...
aceperry 12y ago
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.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Only if you define "general public" as the intersection of Google Apps for Education customers and Adobe Creative Cloud licensees.
ihsw 12y ago
I have some serious doubts about the usefulness of this -- considering how long it will take to "open" a large PSD file. 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. 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.
- Morgawr 12y ago
  How is that any different from trusting Google Drive with your data? Or Dropbox? Or any other cloud backup services? I'm not saying that it's not a problem, because it clearly is, but it sounds like it's a bit too late to be this worried about our business-related files stored on remote servers/services.
r00fus 12y ago
Interesting - so it's Adobe's Photoshop on a VPC, but is only for Windows/Chrome. Remote storage of your designs/files, remote execution, like manipulating via remote desktop/VNC, but hopefully more usable. My two concerns would be a) privacy of data and b) upload/download costs/time - some of the files involved can be huge.
noobface 12y ago
Probably has something to do with the BLAST browser client that VMware is doing with chromebooks. http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-working-together-deliver-graphics-rich-applications-enterprise-cloud-desktops.html http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-wor...
jonalmeida 12y ago
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. 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.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
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) 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. 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. Interesting that terminals are the future once again.
- astrocat 12y ago
  The power/electricity analogy here is what's really key - there will come a time when the ubiquity of being "online" will be the same as the ubiquity of "the power is on." It's so prevalent in modern society we really don't think about it. It took me a while to realize that this is where Google is headed with ChromeOS/Chromebooks. Ultimately, "applications/apps" will not exist, there will just be the web and all personal computing devices become thin clients. What to use photoshop? great, go to //photoshop.adobe (or something); Office? //office.microsoft; play the latest COD? //callofduty.activision. [EDIT: also note the importance of search in this scenario...] I think google's bet is that just like CompUSA and other computer retail outlets have died, so too will "app stores" that sell digital equivalents of physical boxed apps. All apps will become services available openly on the web. It's definitely exciting, though I realize it makes a lot of people scared and there are definitely security risks that need to be kept in mind. But overall I see it as another step in the democratization of access and knowledge. A few hundred years ago, only the privileged had access to resources enabling them to read and write and create things. A few years ago, only those with some serious cash could (legally) purchase a license to operate a copy of Adobe's products. Now, any kid with 100 bucks and a decent laptop can spend 3 months with the entire Adobe catalog available to them. Pretty soon, that "high-powered" hardware requirement will be gone and the market opens up even further and pricing will drop even more. That's pretty awesome.
emehrkay 12y ago
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?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  NaCl is very much alive, much to my chagrin (I hate Google's pushing of proprietary stuff like NaCl, it's like Microsoft with ActiveX a decade or so ago). However, I suspect Adobe are unwilling to port Photoshop to NaCl.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  It has been integrated into Chrome, but hardly anyone uses it.
jauwe 12y ago
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
cabbeer 12y ago
We went from Computer terminals to independent computing and now back to terminals (just on a network).
dutchbrit 12y ago
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
Animats 12y ago
All your pictures are belong to us. (From p. 117 of the EULA: (http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/CC_EULA_Gen_WWCombined-MULTI-20121017_1230.pdf http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licens...) "All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Adobe and its suppliers.)
- pyrmont 12y ago
  You're misunderstanding what that sentence means. In context: 3. Intellectual Property Ownership The Software and any authorized copies that Customer makes are the intellectual property of and are owned by Adobe Systems Incorporated and its suppliers. The structure, organization, and source code of the Software are the valuable trade secrets and confidential information of Adobe Systems Incorporated and its suppliers. The Software is protected by law, including but not limited to the copyright laws of the United States and other countries, and by international treaty provisions. Except as expressly stated herein, this agreement does not grant Customer any intellectual property rights in the Software. All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Adobe and its suppliers. The rights being referred to are rights that Adobe (and its suppliers) have in the software. Courts long ago decided that, absent specific wording to the contrary, implicit rights and obligations can be read into contracts. This type of specific wording tries to avoid that from happening. I haven't read the rest of the document so I can't speak as to whether the EULA does indeed transfer/license your rights to Adobe, but if there is such a provision, this is not it.
MarkMc 12y ago
This is big news. Chrome OS now has the potential to destroy Windows. 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. If I was Microsoft I'd be very worried right now.
- ksk 12y ago
  I'm not Microsoft, but as a user I'm worried. I certainly will not be supporting these kinds of anti-user lock-in SaaS platforms. I'm hoping users will ignore them, and they will fail.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I hope so, but I doubt this will happen, thanks to business users. When you run a company, you don't want your graphics stuff to tinker around software and talk about freedom or whatever. You want them to get their job done, to make one graphic after another, to fulfil contracts. You need to pay for the software anyway, and as long as you have cashflow you can pay for the "services" (if you can't, you have bigger problems). So, like always, companies will trade off freedom for convenience. The rest will have to follow, and the world will be worse off.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
This is stupid. Latency (which can't 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. 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. 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.
- e12e 12y ago
  Agreed. But only if that's how it's implemented (essentilly VNC to a centralized app). But if it runs code locally, then latency should be fine. I've not seen any details on what they're actually providing, so it's hard to tell what they're offering. I'd assume it's a continuation of their "creative cloud" offering, which as far as I know, caches the application code (and assets) locally?
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    The article and comments ITT suggest that it is not like the existing "Creative Cloud", but instead works like VNC, or perhaps renders UI locally while doing all the actual image editing on a server. If it was all client code, there's no way it would run acceptably on cheapo Chromebooks (because Photoshop is a behemoth, mind, not because it's inherently impossible to edit graphics on a low-end device).
frozenport 12y ago
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.
paulhauggis 12y ago
This is the natural progression of the most pirated software app on the Internet.
zobzu 12y ago
i dont know if i like the idea of depending on a zillion diff companies for everything i do or own on the computer to be honest.
sandGorgon 12y ago
I really, really wish they would port Photoshop to Linux - it's going to be the killer app for Linux, hugely driving up adoption.
- readerrrr 12y ago
  I don't see how, can you elaborate?
  - babby 12y ago
    As a weh developer, I need photoshop, thus I'm stuck with either a Mac or Windows system. I'd much prefer to drop the VM's and go full Linux. I can't. Because of Photoshop.
    - lk145 12y ago
      Totally agree with you. I would just use Linux if I could run Illustrator with out any special setup on Linux. Instead I have a MacBook Pro.
      - readerrrr 12y ago
        I think you two are a minority, that is why Adobe doesn't care. Most programmers aren't artists/designers.
        sandGorgon 12y ago
        This has nothing to do about programmers. Artists/designers have two choices today to use Photoshop - windows or mac. In third world countries, buying either is quite expensive. You get a whole range of laptops/desktops in Asia with Ubuntu installed (including Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.). It would be really cool to open it up to the Adobe ecosystem.
        readerrrr 12y ago
        Even if third world countries represent a meaningful fraction of artists and designers, thinking that they actually buy software is not realistic. Their piracy percentages are >90%. Why do you think Adobe is switching to a network model.
bazuka 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that after all these years, Chromebook is the one who made Adobe port Photoshop to a linux-based OS?
- teacup50 12y ago
  Photoshop used to run on IRIX ...
pjmlp 12y ago
No thanks. A glorified X-Windows/RDP/VNC/... terminal in form of a browser. I love my cores, my GPU, my hard disk, ... I rather stay on my beloved island seeing the ships sailing away a certain destiny of doom.
thomasfl 12y ago
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.
- iribe 12y ago
  If I had a nickel for every apple fanboi claiming google steals from apple I'd be rich. Please, get over it, let's not act like apple doesn't copy.
  - thomasfl 12y ago
    I can get over it. Even if it's more like cloning than copying. I found an old issue of Wallpaper Magazine from 1997 with ad's for Mark Newson's watch named Ikepod. Both the name and the watch are similar to the iPod that appeared first time in 2001. Apple has off course copied a lot it's design from Braun's Dieter Rams. Rams is has retired, but Newson has just started working for apple.

368 points by zastrowm 12y ago

I wonder what "initially with a streaming version of Photoshop" actually means. In a roundabout way, this is Photoshop on Linux, which is interesting.

jdjb 12y ago
This is a web application version of Photoshop. Nothing more (and it should run on any OS with a modern browser).
- DannyBee 12y ago
  No, it isn't ;)
- taude 12y ago
  Are you sure? It sure sounds like this is a version of Photoshop, running in a managed VM in the cloud by Adobe.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    The client is still Chrome, though.

justinsb 12y ago

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? 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).

quite 12y ago
So, it is the latter you prefer? -- VNC/remote desktop
- justinsb 12y ago
  No, I want the virtual machine to run on my Chromebook. And it sounds like that is what they're doing!
  - thefreeman 12y ago
    No, they specifically say that if your internet connection is terminated you will need to reconnect and restore your session. It is a virtual machine running in the cloud and you are VNC'ing in from your browser.
ethomson 12y ago
The current version of Creative Cloud is really just a different license; indeed you do still download (say) Photoshop, it just pings the Adobe servers to ensure that you have paid your monthly or annual licensing. To call it "the cloud" is really in name only, as it's no different than the Photoshop that you pay a one-time fee for and install from DVD. This is totally different, as you suggest, it's a VNC-style access for Photoshop. (Since there is no Photoshop for Linux.)
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  Really the cloud offering in the name applies to their storage (20 GB as individual, 100 GB as a business account [1 TB should be standard at this point imo]), Typekit and Kuler. The applications, like you said are pretty much the same as always with full local installations.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    But this suggests Adobe might move to remote execution SaaS at some point in the next few years. I wouldn't be surprised if that's always been the ultimate goal of CC. A lot of SaaS is waiting for faster broadband. CC Saas will be limited at 10MB, but as speeds creep up to 100MB and beyond it's going to start making more sense. I think the rent-your-cycles model sucks for users, and is against everything personal computing was supposed to do. But it's a no-brainer for corporates with a captive audience for life, zero piracy, and easy surveillance.

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arscan 12y ago

For those wondering how the "streaming" version of Photoshop is implemented: 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. http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq

bshimmin 12y ago
I'm pretty excited to see how utterly wretched the performance will be!
- DannyBee 12y ago
  Yeah, all those people who bought chromebooks for their bleeding edge performance will be really upset.
- andybak 12y ago
  If you can play an FPS remotely (and I have - and it works) then I think this is a walk in the park.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Yeah, low-latency streaming using x264 was solved in 2010. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/249
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago

flixic 12y ago

Well this is interesting. Their FAQ[0] contains some more information, but still does not explain everything. They say "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." 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: "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." 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. [0]: http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming/faq

VikingCoder 12y ago
I don't see pixel-level precision being hard. As for color-correction, I would bet they have settings to allow you to adjust based on your monitor.
- flixic 12y ago
  Doing color correction based on monitor colors would be impossible: sometimes you adjust, for instance, RGB curves for one specific layer. It could mean that half of the screen is changing with every step of the slider, and you want exact color, immediately.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    I think you're making this overly complicated. For one, doing client-side color correction (for example with WebGL) is technically possible. It's probably not in this solution, but let's not use words like "impossible" unless they're actually impossible. But more importantly, I think you're just complaining about latency, but then you're using the phrase "impossible." EDIT: I thought you were talking about gamma correction and the color space of the display, where the program running on the server wouldn't know about the gamma and color characteristics of the monitor on your current browser. Thus, "monitor settings." But no, you're just worried in general about whole-screen fill rate latency. Again, I think using terms like "impossible" is hyperbole. It will be fine for some users, and not for others.

ethomson 12y ago

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 disable support for Chrome on Linux. Are Chromebooks so different than the shipping version of Chrome for Linux?

sheetjs 12y ago
> Streaming Photoshop can be run on any Chromebook or Chrome Browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that they disable support for chrome on linux. It's possible that it can run on Chrome for Linux but Adobe won't necessarily provide support in the same way that they provide support for the Windows version.
- aceperry 12y ago
  That's probably the main reason. It's too bad though because it would be great to have it available on linux, even in an unsupported offering.
  - zfran 12y ago
    chances are that once it comes out someone will hack it/reverse it to "run" on a standard Linux setup
dandroid1 12y ago
Probably just heavy collaboration with Google, and Google wanting to push Chromebooks.
anonbanker 12y ago
ChromeOS is gentoo linux. I consider this a Photoshop port. :-)

whizzkid 12y ago

I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. 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. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. 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. 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. 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.

Bahamut 12y ago
Except you don't own most software you have on your machine locally. You agree to a license to use it.
- whizzkid 12y ago
  "I want to own my hardware and software power" I think this states what I am trying to say.
  - wffurr 12y ago
    The parent is specifically addressing that point. You don't own most of the software you are purchasing. The vendor retains either the technical or legal ability to reach into your machine and disable the software via the licensing agreement.
    - whizzkid 12y ago
      I understand the point, which is really reasonable. But how about this way; In order to disable the software that I installed on my machine, they need to know who I am, which computer it is installed to, plus lots of other procedures to deal with. Which is time consuming and not easy. In order to disable cloud hosted software, - User.find(me).licence.valid = false

jiggy2011 12y ago

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.

TkTech 12y ago
CS6 already has gold status under Wine, works quite well. They could "port" it to Linux just by wrapping it in a Wine container and fixing a few bugs, much like gog does with games (using both Wine & dosbox)
kevind23 12y ago
Well, it's being ported to run in a virtual environment, not necessarily even Linux :/
rozap 12y ago
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Apple or Microsoft were paying Adobe large sums of money to not do that.

dochtman 12y ago

This would have been more interesting if they'd ported Photoshop to asm.js, or even NaCL...

aceperry 12y ago

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.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
Only if you define "general public" as the intersection of Google Apps for Education customers and Adobe Creative Cloud licensees.

ihsw 12y ago

I have some serious doubts about the usefulness of this -- considering how long it will take to "open" a large PSD file. 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. 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.

Morgawr 12y ago
How is that any different from trusting Google Drive with your data? Or Dropbox? Or any other cloud backup services? I'm not saying that it's not a problem, because it clearly is, but it sounds like it's a bit too late to be this worried about our business-related files stored on remote servers/services.

r00fus 12y ago

Interesting - so it's Adobe's Photoshop on a VPC, but is only for Windows/Chrome. Remote storage of your designs/files, remote execution, like manipulating via remote desktop/VNC, but hopefully more usable. My two concerns would be a) privacy of data and b) upload/download costs/time - some of the files involved can be huge.

noobface 12y ago

Probably has something to do with the BLAST browser client that VMware is doing with chromebooks. http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-working-together-deliver-graphics-rich-applications-enterprise-cloud-desktops.html http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-wor...

jonalmeida 12y ago

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. 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.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

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) 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. 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. Interesting that terminals are the future once again.

astrocat 12y ago
The power/electricity analogy here is what's really key - there will come a time when the ubiquity of being "online" will be the same as the ubiquity of "the power is on." It's so prevalent in modern society we really don't think about it. It took me a while to realize that this is where Google is headed with ChromeOS/Chromebooks. Ultimately, "applications/apps" will not exist, there will just be the web and all personal computing devices become thin clients. What to use photoshop? great, go to //photoshop.adobe (or something); Office? //office.microsoft; play the latest COD? //callofduty.activision. [EDIT: also note the importance of search in this scenario...] I think google's bet is that just like CompUSA and other computer retail outlets have died, so too will "app stores" that sell digital equivalents of physical boxed apps. All apps will become services available openly on the web. It's definitely exciting, though I realize it makes a lot of people scared and there are definitely security risks that need to be kept in mind. But overall I see it as another step in the democratization of access and knowledge. A few hundred years ago, only the privileged had access to resources enabling them to read and write and create things. A few years ago, only those with some serious cash could (legally) purchase a license to operate a copy of Adobe's products. Now, any kid with 100 bucks and a decent laptop can spend 3 months with the entire Adobe catalog available to them. Pretty soon, that "high-powered" hardware requirement will be gone and the market opens up even further and pricing will drop even more. That's pretty awesome.

emehrkay 12y ago

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?

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
NaCl is very much alive, much to my chagrin (I hate Google's pushing of proprietary stuff like NaCl, it's like Microsoft with ActiveX a decade or so ago). However, I suspect Adobe are unwilling to port Photoshop to NaCl.
pjmlp 12y ago
It has been integrated into Chrome, but hardly anyone uses it.

jauwe 12y ago

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

cabbeer 12y ago

We went from Computer terminals to independent computing and now back to terminals (just on a network).

dutchbrit 12y ago

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

Animats 12y ago

All your pictures are belong to us. (From p. 117 of the EULA: (http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/CC_EULA_Gen_WWCombined-MULTI-20121017_1230.pdf http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licens...) "All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Adobe and its suppliers.)

pyrmont 12y ago
You're misunderstanding what that sentence means. In context: 3. Intellectual Property Ownership The Software and any authorized copies that Customer makes are the intellectual property of and are owned by Adobe Systems Incorporated and its suppliers. The structure, organization, and source code of the Software are the valuable trade secrets and confidential information of Adobe Systems Incorporated and its suppliers. The Software is protected by law, including but not limited to the copyright laws of the United States and other countries, and by international treaty provisions. Except as expressly stated herein, this agreement does not grant Customer any intellectual property rights in the Software. All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Adobe and its suppliers. The rights being referred to are rights that Adobe (and its suppliers) have in the software. Courts long ago decided that, absent specific wording to the contrary, implicit rights and obligations can be read into contracts. This type of specific wording tries to avoid that from happening. I haven't read the rest of the document so I can't speak as to whether the EULA does indeed transfer/license your rights to Adobe, but if there is such a provision, this is not it.

MarkMc 12y ago

This is big news. Chrome OS now has the potential to destroy Windows. 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. If I was Microsoft I'd be very worried right now.

ksk 12y ago
I'm not Microsoft, but as a user I'm worried. I certainly will not be supporting these kinds of anti-user lock-in SaaS platforms. I'm hoping users will ignore them, and they will fail.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I hope so, but I doubt this will happen, thanks to business users. When you run a company, you don't want your graphics stuff to tinker around software and talk about freedom or whatever. You want them to get their job done, to make one graphic after another, to fulfil contracts. You need to pay for the software anyway, and as long as you have cashflow you can pay for the "services" (if you can't, you have bigger problems). So, like always, companies will trade off freedom for convenience. The rest will have to follow, and the world will be worse off.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

This is stupid. Latency (which can't 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. 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. 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.

e12e 12y ago
Agreed. But only if that's how it's implemented (essentilly VNC to a centralized app). But if it runs code locally, then latency should be fine. I've not seen any details on what they're actually providing, so it's hard to tell what they're offering. I'd assume it's a continuation of their "creative cloud" offering, which as far as I know, caches the application code (and assets) locally?
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  The article and comments ITT suggest that it is not like the existing "Creative Cloud", but instead works like VNC, or perhaps renders UI locally while doing all the actual image editing on a server. If it was all client code, there's no way it would run acceptably on cheapo Chromebooks (because Photoshop is a behemoth, mind, not because it's inherently impossible to edit graphics on a low-end device).

frozenport 12y ago

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.

paulhauggis 12y ago

This is the natural progression of the most pirated software app on the Internet.

zobzu 12y ago

i dont know if i like the idea of depending on a zillion diff companies for everything i do or own on the computer to be honest.

sandGorgon 12y ago

I really, really wish they would port Photoshop to Linux - it's going to be the killer app for Linux, hugely driving up adoption.

readerrrr 12y ago
I don't see how, can you elaborate?
- babby 12y ago
  As a weh developer, I need photoshop, thus I'm stuck with either a Mac or Windows system. I'd much prefer to drop the VM's and go full Linux. I can't. Because of Photoshop.
  - lk145 12y ago
    Totally agree with you. I would just use Linux if I could run Illustrator with out any special setup on Linux. Instead I have a MacBook Pro.
    - readerrrr 12y ago
      I think you two are a minority, that is why Adobe doesn't care. Most programmers aren't artists/designers.
      - sandGorgon 12y ago
        This has nothing to do about programmers. Artists/designers have two choices today to use Photoshop - windows or mac. In third world countries, buying either is quite expensive. You get a whole range of laptops/desktops in Asia with Ubuntu installed (including Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.). It would be really cool to open it up to the Adobe ecosystem.
        readerrrr 12y ago
        Even if third world countries represent a meaningful fraction of artists and designers, thinking that they actually buy software is not realistic. Their piracy percentages are >90%. Why do you think Adobe is switching to a network model.

bazuka 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that after all these years, Chromebook is the one who made Adobe port Photoshop to a linux-based OS?

teacup50 12y ago
Photoshop used to run on IRIX ...

pjmlp 12y ago

No thanks. A glorified X-Windows/RDP/VNC/... terminal in form of a browser. I love my cores, my GPU, my hard disk, ... I rather stay on my beloved island seeing the ships sailing away a certain destiny of doom.

thomasfl 12y ago

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.

iribe 12y ago
If I had a nickel for every apple fanboi claiming google steals from apple I'd be rich. Please, get over it, let's not act like apple doesn't copy.
- thomasfl 12y ago
  I can get over it. Even if it's more like cloning than copying. I found an old issue of Wallpaper Magazine from 1997 with ad's for Mark Newson's watch named Ikepod. Both the name and the watch are similar to the iPod that appeared first time in 2001. Apple has off course copied a lot it's design from Braun's Dieter Rams. Rams is has retired, but Newson has just started working for apple.