Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop Online Within Six Months
scobrown writes "Adobe is going to create a software-as-a-service version of photoshop that it will initially be offering for free. It should be available within 6 months. It is supposed to be ad supported... but we'll see how long that lasts"
This is nothing new. There was an online version of GIMP available 7 years ago. It wasn't a commercial success, but with today's hardware and bandwidth prices, and with a modern AJAX interface, would it stand a chance now? Adobe obviously seem to think so.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Whenever people Photoshop comes up at Slashdot, people mention Gimp. But Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop as far as professional users are concerned. Gimp is like so many OSS projects, a rat's nest of messed up code, no real road map, and half-assed implementations "features".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seems like it will be an interesting experiment in software as a service, but media editing seems to be a bad fit for the "software as an online service" model due to the high bandwidth & processing demands. The math has to be done either on the user's end (which would be bad for folks with low spec systems, who i see as the primary target for this business model) or on Adobe's systems (which will cost them money, decreasing their bottom line). Anyone with experience in the field have any compelling reasons why one would chose to use adobe's online photoshop rather than just using picasa or gimp?
[shameless]n ew-editor
Hey I created some sort of javascript drawing tool. You can edit images other people created. And draw new ones:
Here I blog about it: http://the-timing.nl/blog/2006/10/wiki-art-has-a-
This is the actual application: http://wiki-art.fokdat.nl/
And it works in Opera, Firefox, IE and Safari!
[/shameless]
ActiveX and Flash are far from the same thing. The main problems with ActiveX is its windows only and its insecure. You also forget to mention java.
As far as being windows only, Flash and Java have the problem of requiring closed source bytecode interpreters, but run on other platforms. They are both relatively secure as well. Both have interpreters available for linux so you will be able to run this on linux.
I really hope this gets implemented as a J2EE delivered webapp with a flash frontend. Flash has the potential to be a platform of choice for rich web apps, and I think whatever R&D comes out of delivering photoshop as a flash app will translate into newer flash developer tools. I see this as the Flash equivilant of putting a man on the moon in terms of positive side effects.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
To illustrate that you are most likely correct consider that the lead artist that works on professional photo restoration at YellowCatDesign typically works with files many gigabytes in size. A simple 8x11 inch at 600dpi and 8bit per color clocks in at 100MB. Most images are scanned at higher resolutions at higher bitdepth (and I think in CMYK rather then RGB). Also I've seen our professionals use tons of layers (10-100) which can add significantly to the filesize. I just don't see that amount of data beeing transferred between a web-based client and a remote server in real time.
Still, for smaller images having photoshop available online would be great.