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Photoshop’s journey to the web

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Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#61

Post by JohnWhigham »

randomluck040 wrote: post #15
CincinnatiMan wrote: post #12

Really interesting how the browser is becoming the universal OS. It sort of gives more power/control to Google and reduces it from Apple and Microsoft. Would love to be in the executive meetings where they discuss the implications of this.

Is this something to be worried about? I also see more and more things in the field of geography , especially data visualisation, to start living in browsers and most people default to Chrome.

Yes, it is something to worry about. It's wresting control away from users via their no longer able to run native applications. And it's only going to continue with the continuing new generation of programmers who know nothing but JavaScript continue to implement everything in JavaScript because they've never known a world that doesn't have JavaScript.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#62

Post by therealdrag0 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #49

I'm not at all looking forward the future where "conveniences" provided by operating systems (like consistent GUI styling, preferences, accessibility, etc) are thrown by the wayside and each application effectively re-implements a GUI targeting a canvas "framebuffer".

The future is now.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#65

Post by BuildTheRobots »

pier25 wrote: post #19

I can see Illustrator and Photoshop running on a browser but I doubt we'll see After Effects and Premiere on WASM any time soon. IMO the solution will probably be a combination of browser based UI and cloud based processing. The drawback of this approach is that the server would need to host the project files.

Somewhat tangential, but if people are looking for an After Effects / Premiere alternative, I highly recommend Davinci Resolve.

I can only really speak to the editing, but it seems leaps ahead of premier in a lot of ways. Very quick for scrubbing through 4k footage (even the free version) and far more intelligence when it comes to certain jobs (eg throw a folder of RAW photos in there to make a hyperlapse and it'll recognise them as a sequence and let you treat it as video).

The free version contains 90% of the features and is completely free - even for commercial use. The studio version is a one-off £250 (two seats) with free major and minor updates for life. It ran on Linux before it could even run on Windows and has just been optimised for M1 Macs.

Considering Adobe wants £238/year just for Premier (editing) or £600/year for the whole suite if I want After Effects (Resolve has "Fusion" built in for sfx, though admittedly the CS suite has far more to it than just that), for my uses it seemed like a no-brainer. And I got a free editor keyboard (£250 retail) when I bought the license.

My only annoyance is that Premier is so ubiquitous that you can need a license to be able to open projects from other editors. And that also requires you're all on the same version as the file format gets bumped every version (infuriating if you've deliberately stayed a version behind because it runs better on your older hardware). I find it quite ironic as the two big Premier users (companies) I know will do their final cut in Premier, render it and then throw it to a colourist who imports their final video into Davinci for colour grading anyway.

One of them already has plans to transition across for the edit, but as they have decades of combined experience working with Premier, it's a difficult if not dangerous decision to deliberately loose productivity whilst people retrain. If you're just starting out, especially at home or in a small team, then the idea of starting with Premier seems crazy.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#66

Post by DeathArrow »

Just because something is doable (running a complex app such as an OS or Photoshop or 3D Max in a browser)- doesn't mean that you should do it.

Also, I'd rather own the application (and run it on my computer) and my data rather then rent the application and depend on a company to have access to my data.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#67

Post by jjice »

arthur_sav wrote: post #40
achow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and created by 1 person. My name is Ivan Kutskir and I am the only developer of Photopea. I am 27 years old graduate of the Charles University in Prague. I live in Prague, Czech Republic, but I was born in Ukraine. https://blog.photopea.com/creating-photopea.html [Edit] Reddit AMA (3yrs ago) and HN discussion on it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18397380

If i remember correctly, the whole app runs in the browser without a backend which is pretty amazing.

And no WASM either last time I checked. The author also has multiple open source imaging JS libraries on his GitHub that he created for PhotoPea

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#68

Post by paulgb »

zz865 wrote: post #51

As someone who is bad at JS I really hoped webassembly would let me leapfrog JS/React etc. Is it time to start using it?

I'd like the answer to be “yes”, but at this point if you need to ship software I'd say “no”. There are wasm counterparts to React (my favorite right now is yew.rs), but they're self-described as not production-ready. Overall, the tooling is just much more developed on the JS/React side. Unfortunately.

That said, you can get plenty of mileage out of using React as a frontend and wasm for the application core. I believe this is what Figma does. And you can sidestep the DOM entirely and use your own UI renderer, which seems to be what Adobe is doing here. https://makepad.dev/ is another (absurdly impressive) example of that approach, but that's a very involved approach!

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#69

Post by jon-wood »

orangepurple wrote: post #57
zz865 wrote: post #51

As someone who is bad at JS I really hoped webassembly would let me leapfrog JS/React etc. Is it time to start using it?

No, layout is all CSS with some JS mixed in, and will be for a long time. Webassembly will help accelerate heavy mathematical computations such as canvas graphics.

You could hypothetically use Webassembly to build your entire application around a canvas and either render directly with canvas calls or WebGL, but it would somewhat miss the point of the web unless you're explicitly building a game or something.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#70

Post by skadamat »

astlouis44 wrote: post #11

WebAssembly is coming for games next. Near native performance, players can join with just a link, and no 30% cut that developers have to deal with.

Yeah there's lots of alternatives to the app stores for windows games. You can also just sell direct to consumer.

The real challenge with webassembly as it applies to games (at least large ones) is the asset size. AA - AAA games are 20-100 GB and that can't just live in browser cache.

Also, to be honest building a complex game and shipping it to the web is kinda crap shoot for other reasons. Games are power hungry, and don't want to be limited by browsers. Also, a browser is a massive application that sits around consuming resources that a AAA native game could use.

But of course, I imagine games will be developed differently to take advantage of the web (smaller games, streaming in levels / textures as needed, etc).

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