
Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop - zastrowm
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2014/09/adobe-joins-chromebook-party-starting.html
======
flixic
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)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Whose to say this is VNC-based? VNC is very old technology. RDP/NX solve a lot
of these problems. Or this could a x-server like application. Who knows, but I
doubt Adobe is launching something that uses VNC-type technology where it
samples and over-compresses the screen. I imagine things like color precision
are well taken care of.

Also, anyone else notice this amusing note at the bottom of the FAQ:

Please post your issues to [Insert Forum Link]

~~~
voidlogic
If you were building this for a modern Linux client, wouldn't spice be the
logical technology to leverage?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_%28protocol%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_%28protocol%29)

------
whizzkid
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.

~~~
ewzimm
On the flip side, you can consider that traditional proprietary software
installs usually have full access to read and modify your system, often in
ways you don't expect or wouldn't consent to. Running in a virtualized
environment in a browser significantly reduces access to your system. So if
you run a free software local install with proprietary programs running in a
jailed browser environment, you are probably more secure than you would be if
you had installed them locally.

~~~
javajosh
But think this through...if you don't run _anything_ locally then what,
exactly, are you protecting on your local system by running things remotely?

Although honestly, for something like photoshop I really don't see a problem.
It's a creative tool, and probably isn't producing interesting data for the
NSA, et al. The real security concern here is Adobe's, in that they want to
protect _their_ software from _you_ , the user. They want to set up an
annuity-style revenue stream, and the only way to do that is to protect the
binary image of their software. So they did that.

Really, the only objection I would have to this is that it adds a (sometimes
rather difficult to meet) requirement that you have a solid internet
connection to run what used to be a stand-alone application. More
philosophically, I object to the _horrible waste_ this kind of runtime
requires, particularly of network bandwidth. Perhaps, though, this is the
price of saving the premium proprietary software market.

~~~
seanflyon
You are protecting your private information in cloud A from company B. I can
trust different groups with different information without giving them all
access to the whole set.

~~~
newuser88273
Except for Google, who will (eventually) actively mine all of it, likely by
way of some plausible universal search feature.

------
ChuckMcM
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
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.

~~~
anon1385
It's not awesome at all. It's the death of personal computing.

What to use Photoshop? Pay a perpetual monthly fee forever, with no control
over which version of the software you are using. Adobe jacked up the price
this year for the new version despite a lack of new features? Tough, nothing
you can do about it. It's either pay up or lose access. The new version is
buggy? Tough luck.

Want to modify any of the software on your computer in any way or install any
local software? That disables the trusted DRM and none of your remote apps
will load anymore because your machine is no longer trusted. (We already have
this on Chromebooks for DRM video).

Want to cancel your Microsoft Office subscription? Fine, now you've lost the
ability to view any of your documents any more.

Want to continue using SuperAwesomeApp? Too bad, they just shut down the
servers forever. Sorry, no refunds.

All your files hosted in the cloud and data mined for terrorist terms, for
your safety of course.

All your files hosted in the cloud and data mined to build marketing profiles.

Every piece of software having the ultimate in user lock-in - total control
over the users data.

I find it hard to imagine a more dystopian future for software.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Uh no.

You see the reason personal computing _exists_ is because it was people who
wanted this level of control and "their own computer" started using these
cheezy "calculator chips" to build their own computers. What they could do was
a lot less than what the mainframes/minicomputers/workstations could do but
you could own your own.

All of those things are still true.

But there is a rub. Today you can go on some warez forum and get a cracked
Adobe CSx suite and run it on your machine at home. That feature goes away,
Your only option is to run Gimp, and if it doesn't have features you need,
then you get to write new features yourself because, well its open and you
have the source code.

So the world will change, it always does, but the ability for engineers and
hobbyists to have their own computers that do exactly what they want them to
do, that won't change.

~~~
jiggy2011
Sure, but you then end up with two entirely divergent software ecosystems.

As it stands two people, one of whom uses Linux/LibreOffice/GIMP and another
who uses Windows/MS Office/Photoshop are able (bar some possible formatting
issues) to share data and collaborate together because they can share files
via dropbox or USB dongles.

Once Photoshop and Office move entirely to the cloud there will no longer
necessarily be "files" to share.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is true, and to the extent that those cloud applications don't use an
open interchange standard you won't be able to share documents with them.
Having lived through this from before[1], it isn't as dire as you might
imagine. What happened last time is that it forced a lot of interchange
formats. Will be interesting to see if it does that again. All of the market
forces are still there, person A wants to send a document to person B, etc. Of
course everyone can send HTML or RTF documents like they do today.

[1] Intel used MultiMate for its documents (as did a bunch of lawyers) while
nearly everybody in the tech space was using Interleaf. Xerox was trying to be
the paperless glue for the middle. We got PostScript out of it, which was an
interesting compromise.

~~~
pyre
The difference here is that you actually had a copy of the data. If the vendor
(e.g. Microsoft) decides to lock you in, they will keep the data in the cloud,
with their app being the only access point. Then, locally you will only have a
copy of "application state" at any point in time.

------
arscan
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
I'm pretty excited to see how utterly wretched the performance will be!

~~~
andybak
If you can play an FPS remotely (and I have - and it works) then I think this
is a walk in the park.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Maybe if you're playing a 30FPS "cinematic experience."

Meanwhile, the hardcore PC FPS gamers with 120hz+ monitors running the game at
2x displayable framerate can't even tolerate the latency from enabling vsync.

------
ANTSANTS
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
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
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).

------
bazuka
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
Photoshop used to run on IRIX ...

------
pjmlp
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.

------
Animats
All your pictures are belong to us.

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

~~~
pyrmont
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.

------
noobface
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-
wor...](http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2014/08/vmware-nvidia-google-working-
together-deliver-graphics-rich-applications-enterprise-cloud-desktops.html)

------
MarkMc
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
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
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.

------
ethomson
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
> 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
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
chances are that once it comes out someone will hack it/reverse it to "run" on
a standard Linux setup

------
emehrkay
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
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.

------
justinsb
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).

~~~
ethomson
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
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
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.

~~~
wldcordeiro
Yeah it's not a change I'm excited for if it does materialize.

------
jiggy2011
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
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)

------
jonalmeida
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.

------
r00fus
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.

------
sgarrity
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
This is a web application version of Photoshop. Nothing more (and it should
run on any OS with a modern browser).

~~~
taude
Are you sure? It sure sounds like this is a version of Photoshop, running in a
managed VM in the cloud by Adobe.

~~~
JetSpiegel
The client is still Chrome, though.

------
aceperry
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
Only if you define "general public" as the intersection of Google Apps for
Education customers and Adobe Creative Cloud licensees.

------
sandGorgon
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
I don't see how, can you elaborate?

~~~
babby
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
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
I think you two are a minority, that is why Adobe doesn't care.

Most programmers aren't artists/designers.

~~~
sandGorgon
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
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.

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

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

------
thomasfl
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
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
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.

------
zobzu
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.

------
dutchbrit
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

------
ihsw
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
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.

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

------
jauwe
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

