Photoshop comes to Chrome OS in limited beta

Not always, when you're working off a laptop and have limited hard drive space. I've started deleting raws after conversion, and that results in a lot of 'orphaned' entries in LR's database.
Lightroom doesn't just force you to copy pictures off the card, it forces you to add pictures to its catalog.

Gimp, Raw Therapee as well as Digikam is a great combination that you are free to put on any number of computers and use at any time.

Maybe Chrome OS will be useful in the future if your connection is permanently rock solid. But that is not yet the case everywhere yet.

A 'mostly on' connection is fine for browsing and email. But it should not be confused with other types of computer use.

So you are of the opinion you can protect your computer and its files from loss or theft better than professionally managed servers and services?

How do you know this is a virtualized environment? Is there a full press release? From DPReview I'm not getting that. I'm seeing it's running as an HTML5 app.

So it runs in a VM, do you think windows is running in that VM, I have heard rumors of a Linux Photoshop from another source, getting Photoshop to run on a platform means it got compiled in some way or another for that platform. On the concept of VM, every userland application android is run inside the Dalvik Virtual Machine and is written in Java.

AFAIK, Photoshop runs the original CC code inside a ChromeOS virtual environment. More than that, nothing is known. True, ChromeOS supports Java and its VM concept. OTOH, Photoshop is written in C++ rather than Java and Adobe will NOT rewrite it.

So, I can only assume that this is a Windows VM Google choose to support to work around the limitations of ChromeOS. Which I consider bad news rather than good news for Chrome. And has nothing to do with Linux.

Adobe insists that "Project Photoshop Streaming is identical to the Photoshop you’d install locally with a few notable exceptions." and that it runs in a Chrome browser, Windows only.

So I think I am discussing details of a technical implementation to a non programmer...

C++ code is portable, the Photoshop code is both compilable for Windows and OSX, there is nothing really stopping a hypothetical Linux port.

The size and requirements on the client computer tells me the photoshop is more or less being run as a plugin into chrome OR run in a VM which is a plugin, either way we can safely assume that the VM is not running Windows, and that is practically because of licensing reasons.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that MICROSOFT has licensed Windows to Google for embedded usage in VM.

Also I think that the memory requirements must make this obvious, it only requires 512 MB of memory, Windows in a VM requires around 512 MB for it self and Photoshop CC barely runs on anything with less than 1 GB of memory due to the memory requirements.

So due to that reason we can assume that Photoshop is running inside a VM that requires no memory for itself.

@KEG, I am fully aware of everything you wrote. I used "Windows VM" in the most possible sloppy way, making use of the only hint we have, i.e., that Streaming Photoshop only runs in the Windows version of the Chrome Browser, and ChromeOS.

Of course, the VM won't be a full VM like VMWare running licensed Windows, that's obvious. But what's obvious too is that Adobe didn't port Photoshop to another UI framework. While it can be done, of course, the effort is significant and the market too small to justify. We don't know what this Windows-alike virtual envorinment actually is. We'll find out soon enough.

You are aware that Cocoa and WIN32 are not exactly the same thing, the APIs are really different, so all Adobe has to do is to port their UI framework to another windowing kit. The chrome OS bit proves that Adobe has already ported their bit to Chrome OS, virtual machine or not, there is not a single bit of Windows on Chrome, totally different API.

KEG, Photoshop started on MacOS and the port to Win32 APIs was justified by the huge Windows market. I don't see Adobe port PS to a third API with marginal market. No way. Something was virtualized and we'll find out what. At this point, I'll stop speculating. Although it was fun to have this conversation with you.

Well ... If you where a programmer then you would know that even sticking to 1 platform for 30 years would mean that the UI code would have been rewritten several times. OS X is for instance much closer technically to Unix and NextSTEP than Mac OS Classic, not to mention that WIN32 was dramatically different from its predecessor. There was a Unix version of Photoshop which was written for Irix, so there is a antiquated version of Photoshop for X11 in the source code repository some where.

Then there are the big customers in the film and 3d industry... You think Adobe is going to ignore them forever?

I very much doubt this is running on wine. Chromebooks don't have the ram and processor to handle Photoshop.

Did you miss the bit in the article that said
"Like other Chrome OS apps Photoshop runs entirely from the cloud."

Once Google and Adobe crack this one, then it opens up the possibility of making Photoshop work on any computer with Google Chrome installed.

Chromebook 13
http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.MPRAA.012

"... However, with Project Photoshop Streaming, we are experimenting with ways to provide additional access our products that are hardware independent—in other words, the ability to access our products from any device without having to download and install. ..."

@kff:

Is this for me? The above sentence does not contradict what I said. It is clever marketing wording for incremental install from the web into a virtual machine.

New servers with IBM Power8 and Nvidia accelerators can help to new cloud / stream apps ... maybe they will be soon :)

@kff:

You are not listening. "Photoshop Streaming" runs on the local CPU *only*.

@JPWhiteAtHome: that's an important part from the article indeed. But it is false information. It must be true because DPR said so? Rather not. btw, it isn't true for some other Chrome apps too.

You are already referring to Adobe FAQ I linked to and DPR did not. You better believe what I said or at least, keep an open mind towards the topic. If you reread what you cited, the info is there but is obscured by Adobe. The three key details are (emphasis by me):
1. "does not require a FULL download"
2. "this is the same BUILD of Photoshop you’d typically download"
3. "GPU dependent features are not YET available "
From that, a programmer can deduce that PS runs in a sandbox on your local machine. I think this isn't a Java VM but Java is the first common example where code from the web could be streamed and executed in a local sandbox. Active X was similiar except it was no sandbox.

You make too many assumptions about VM technologies. The Java VM, e.g., runs on almost any host and needs a few MB only. I really stop responding here though.

It probably is running in the VM, but on the server clusters ... :)

Some other an interesting info:
https://dancingdinosaur.wordpress.com/tag/power8/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/03/ibm_and_nvidia_team_on_power8_servers/

Adobe can begin to think about Linux ...

"The recent announcement also included the first fruits of the OpenPower Foundation, an accelerator from NVIDIA. The new GPU accelerator, integrated directly into the server, is aimed at larger users of big data analytics, especially those using NoSQL databases. The accelerator is incorporated into a new server, the Power System S824L, which includes up to 24 POWER8 cores, 1 TB of memory and up to 2 NVIDIA K40 GPU accelerators. It also includes a bare metal version of Ubuntu Linux. IBM reports it runs extracting patterns for a variety of analytics, big data, and technical computing workloads involving large amounts of data 8x faster."

https://juju.ubuntu.com/charms/

https://juju.ubuntu.com/deployment/

@kff:
what you are referring to is a lasting trend in computional science and supercomputing, to use GPU power as part of computing centers. It just has nothing to do with Adobe's PS streaming project.

Maybe, it helps you to understand the implications of a software done the way you are imagining: every mouse move event (maybe hundred within a single second) would have to be transmitted and every redraw event would have to be sent across the net. Where already some wireless mice are less responsive when brushing in PS.

You actually already have this scenario in virtualized windowing environments which do already exist. They are all painfully slow to use across the internet with PS. You should maybe try them out.

So, assuming Adobe and Google know what they are doing, I concluded the virtual environment must be local.

@kff, not in the case of cloud gaming with video streaming. While acceptable for many online games, the experience is nowhere near a local game. Latencies typically are 100ms or higher. You wouldn't want to use PS brushes this way. Not for serious work.

@Falcon.

So what you are saying is using a brush with an online only editing tool is going to be very laggy due to web response times of 100ms.

Try the brush tools here and see how lag isn't a factor.

http://apps.pixlr.com/editor/

If you right click you'll realize the online photo editing tool is using Flash. Adobe know a thing or three about flash.

If Autodesk can make an online photo editor that has the same look and feel as Photoshop using Adobe's Flash engine, I think Adobe can do the same.

A tool using Flash is exactly an example of code running locally in a virtualized environment, the opposite of what kff was proposing and which would be called cloud gaming with file streaming. NOT what I was talking about when answering to him.

Anyway, Flash is no option as the PS code cannot run inside the Flash environment.

@Falcon.

I get your assertion that the PS code can't run inside flash, but what if Adobe decided to port its photo apps (and maybe others to follow) to a flash environment or something similar, then they would only be maintaining once piece of code for all platforms. This is the power of the cloud. Currently they have to maintain Mac and PC versions of PS in parallel. Adding a third platform would be onerous, converting to a single technology for all platforms would make things easier not more difficult.

We could be looking at the future of CS, if the experiment isn't that successful, then the only ones inconvenienced are Chromebook users, not the mainstream Adobe users. If it succeeds, they can drop the mac and wintel binaries.

The only downside to using flash is that many Apple products don't support it.

This discussion seems to never stop ;)

Flash is no suitable environment for complex OO software like PS. It is written in C++ for a reason. Java would be powerful enough but early attempts to port complex software to the Java VM have failed too.

Flash is currently phased out from the web, replaced by HTML5. Porting PS to HTML5 would yield a true cloud solution but would be an even bigger task, one I consider unfeasible.

IMHO, any attempt to port PS to Flash or HTML5 could kill Adobe if they try hard enough. Fortunately, they have made it pretty clear that Streaming PS runs the same code as stock PS.

You say Flash is unsuitable for complex software like Photoshop, but you seem to ignore that Autodesk have already done it. Call it a proof of concept if you wish but it is very functional, at least as complex as PS7.

You simply can't accept Photoshop can be delivered as a pure web app even though Adobe/Google say they will do it and Autodesk already have.

You can tell us how its not possible, but the real world evidence and forward looking statements from Adobe are to the contrary from what I can see.

I don't ignore what can be done browser-side in Flash or Java.

Pixlr editor may look like PS, with masks, layers, brushes, levels etc. But you severely underestimate the complexity of PS when it comes to more demanding tasks like gigapixel images, hundreds of layers, history brushing, content aware fills, customized brushes, smart selection tools, video timeline editing, 3D rendering, stitching, scripting, plugins, smart objects, ... etc. Stuff which typically needs multithreading, assembly coding, custom memory management or GPU acceleration to perform. And still artists complain PS to not be responsive enough with large brushes etc.

BTW, Flash isn't a pure web app, like Java it's just another programming environment with hardware and OS abstraction.

And I accept a lesser PS-lookalike can be delivered in Java, C# or Flash. Just not a PS replacement. Not yet (C# excluded). And it will be expensive to make when it becomes feasible.

We can get a few different solutions and probably work can divided among more parts between server processor and station's processor ...

"... On DSL or cable Internet connections, latencies of less than 100 milliseconds (ms) are typical and less than 25 ms desired. ..."

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/speedtests/a/network_latency.htm

Datacenters have high network speed e.g.: http://www.mellanox.com/ethernet/40gbe_index.php

Simple solution for future is about speed of network connections and streaming of apps ... or local installation for others - it does not matter if it is directly on OS or on OS in the VM or in the some other engine, but definitely better is to write only one code :) HPC can save sources ...

HPC can save sources and to deliver a high performance by new workflow in the data processing, too...

Architectures of new HPC and Windows PC aren't comparable in saving sources and high performance ... New programs written especially for HPC will be most effective ...

Todays Latency:
Processor <= 10ns, Memory <=100ns, Flash 25-200 μs, Network 0.3-500ms, Disk 2-8 ms

“Because users log on from home there are no boot storms to deal with,” he said. “But we do have a very large range of IOPS requirements. Some apps, like Adobe Photoshop, are very disk-heavy. We calculated we needed IOPS ranging from 20 to 25, right up to around 500 or 600.”

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240232854/Kingston-University-gets-600-IOPS-per-desktop-with-Atlantis-Ilio?asrc=EM_MDN_35492956&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=MDN&utm_campaign=20141021_Kingston%20University%20gets%20600%20IOPS%20per%20desktop%20with%20Atlantis%20Ilio_

Well Falconeyes, time has passed and the Photoshop for Chrome OS is closer than ever before.

Guess what? The PS instance runs on Google servers in their data centers, NOT in a VM on the Chromebook as you vehemently demanded it must.

I don't know I must have just got lucky this time.

"you install a small app from the Chrome Web Store than opens Photoshop on a Google virtual machine in a Google data center — delivering high-end performance on a low-end device."

Somehow I guessed that it must be running on a remote VM not a local one. Such luck. Actualu not luck, I simply understood what this article was saying.

http://www.omgchrome.com/adobe-photoshop-chromebook-streaming-review/