Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#91

Post by emsy »

hrktb wrote: post #50
emsy wrote: post #27

I'm an iOS user. But frankly, iOS sucks for this kind of work. I tried. Copy pasting is slow, file handling is unnecesserily clunky (just give me a file browser Apple). And exporting always needs some kind of workaround because I can't just pop in USB drives (which my wife's Surface Pro gladly accepts).

Don’t you have a file browser now ? What are the main limitations you are hitting ?

That's true, but most of the time, I need to explicitly export files to the file browser, unlike on Android (the last time I used it) where I could just open the file another app has stored somewhere on the file system. I understand their reason for doing it this way, but it's cumbersome that every app has a different way of supporting file interaction, instead of using an already working system: a file system.

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#92

Post by emsy »

hug wrote: post #60
emsy wrote: post #27

I'm an iOS user. But frankly, iOS sucks for this kind of work. I tried. Copy pasting is slow, file handling is unnecesserily clunky (just give me a file browser Apple). And exporting always needs some kind of workaround because I can't just pop in USB drives (which my wife's Surface Pro gladly accepts).

You say you tried, but it sounds to me like you didn't try hard enough. I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I do the vast majority of my photography work on a 9.7" iPad pro, with a Pencil. I'm constantly editing 24mp RAW files in Affinity Photo, which is about as close to full-fat Photoshop running on the iPad as you can possibly get, and let me tell you: It's fantastic. I turn on my camera, I shoot some images. I open…

I tried all sorts of work, from text editing to drawing and music creation. They all kind of work but they are needlessly complicated. On the PC/Mac I can edit a sample in Audacity and just drop it into my DAW, in most cases probably via Drag'n Drop. On iOS I'd have no guarantee if that's even possible for the two apps I'm using.

Copying an edited photo (or drawing in my case) to a flash drive involves an external computer. It's not that it's impossible it*s needlessly complicated and clunky. I don't ant to try hard enough, I want the device to make my work easier.

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#93

Post by 1over137 »

tedchs wrote: post #35

Well, I expect this is the beginning of the end for macOS. iOS and macOS have been converging for a long time. First Photoshop runs on iOS, then Apple makes larger and larger "i" devices until there's one with a 27" screen that sits on your desk, then there's no reason for macOS. At that point everything happens inside one of Apple's sanctioned App Store apps.

That's a definite and worrisome possibility, yes. But the App Store is 10 years old now, and they haven't required it on macOS so far, so there's hope!

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#94

Post by shanghaiaway »

hug wrote: post #60
emsy wrote: post #27

I'm an iOS user. But frankly, iOS sucks for this kind of work. I tried. Copy pasting is slow, file handling is unnecesserily clunky (just give me a file browser Apple). And exporting always needs some kind of workaround because I can't just pop in USB drives (which my wife's Surface Pro gladly accepts).

You say you tried, but it sounds to me like you didn't try hard enough. I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I do the vast majority of my photography work on a 9.7" iPad pro, with a Pencil. I'm constantly editing 24mp RAW files in Affinity Photo, which is about as close to full-fat Photoshop running on the iPad as you can possibly get, and let me tell you: It's fantastic. I turn on my camera, I shoot some images. I open…

You're a hobbyist. This isn't a professional workflow that works for a large number of images. And that tiny display?

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#95

Post by eropple »

scarface74 wrote: post #64
eropple wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Photoshop workflow depends on its ability to act as a plugin host for third party workflow tools and to integrate with the rest of a professional toolchain. So, for me, Photoshop functionally remains a PC/Mac application. (This applies to most applications ported to iOS or even the Web with such fanfare -- I still use Office plugins here and there...)

Apple is introducing some advanced automation features with iOS 12 that may go a long way toward making that easier.

Assuming plugins get updated for an arbitrary new standard that is wholly incompatible both with existing tools and with existing platforms (every Photoshop plugin I have works on Mac and PC and there is zero percent chance that those, even if they are updated, would not be a disgusting upcharge for iOS), sure.

Or one could not use it at all.

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#96

Post by scarface74 »

eropple wrote: post #95
scarface74 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is introducing some advanced automation features with iOS 12 that may go a long way toward making that easier.

Assuming plugins get updated for an arbitrary new standard that is wholly incompatible both with existing tools and with existing platforms (every Photoshop plugin I have works on Mac and PC and there is zero percent chance that those, even if they are updated, would not be a disgusting upcharge for iOS), sure. Or one could not use it at all.

It is not an “arbitrary new standard”. It’s an enhanced port of the Workflow app that Apple acquired a year ago. They added functionality, but the core of inter process communications is the x-callback-url protocol that third party developers have been supporting for years.

http://x-callback-url.com/

As far as app support, you act as if iOS is some backwood platform without robust third party support.

Re: Adobe will bring the full Photoshop to the iPad

#97

Post by eropple »

scarface74 wrote: post #96
eropple wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming plugins get updated for an arbitrary new standard that is wholly incompatible both with existing tools and with existing platforms (every Photoshop plugin I have works on Mac and PC and there is zero percent chance that those, even if they are updated, would not be a disgusting upcharge for iOS), sure. Or one could not use it at all.

It is not an “arbitrary new standard”. It’s an enhanced port of the Workflow app that Apple acquired a year ago. They added functionality, but the core of inter process communications is the x-callback-url protocol that third party developers have been supporting for years. http://x-callback-url.com/ As far as app support, you act as if iOS is some backwood platform without robust third party support.

Third party developers on a mobile platform designed for consumption and very light productivity, sure. Meanwhile, in the world of what is and not what somebody might handwave could be, Photoshop plugins are binary plugins that talk to a C++ API. These plugins are not going to be rewritten for a callback URL protocol and if they were to be it will be slower, less sturdy, and almost certainly to the detriment of platforms that people actually use for this stuff.

I know perfectly well what iOS provides for IPC and it is insufficient for big-boy tasks. I mean, for real: are you going to throw a 16K image with 20-100 layers across heckin' x-callback-url every every time the user makes a change because you want to recompute a layer transform? Do you want it to come back before you die of old age? Or is it actually that, no, this isn't for for-realsies work, this is for the kind of dabbler who won't notice that, and for-realsies work should stay on a Mac until they kill it and we go back to Windows and Linux?

And please don't get me wrong: I'm acting as if the plugins that big-boy apps host are sometimes a decade old and are effectively out of support, because nothing in the Photoshop (or, indeed, most production) universe dies unless, well, Apple kills it. It's even more common for Office plugins and, as mentioned by another poster, it's literally more common than not for audio apps. (Gonna replace VSTs with x-callback-url? We binary-bolt this stuff together because a millisecond is a long time, remember...)

Post reply on HN