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Photoshop’s journey to the web

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Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#71

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.

Download time is the biggest setback for games in the browser in my experience.

That's why games running in browsers need a different approach to asset loading, instead of downloading everything upfront, stream the asset data directly from CDN when needed. It's nothing new, games had to deal with streaming data from slow mass storage devices throughout their entire history.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#72
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

that’s impressive

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#73
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 r…

Second the recommendation for Resolve, just be aware it's the gateway drug to an expensive BlackMagic hardware habit.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#74

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.

You only deal with the Steam or EGS or Gog cut if you're utilizing their storefront; if you are just hosting the game on your own site, then whether that game is a webassembly package or a desktop application, you don't have to pay some gatekeeper (other than your file host). Same thing with Android, though there is a bit more friction there.

This doesn't really solve the issues with advertising though. I believe the main reason so many developers want their games on Steam is because of the greater attention they get rather than the distribution side of things.

That said, I think the niche of casual remote party games would probably work very well here. During the height of the pandemic my friends and I started doing a lot of "remote game nights" with various different kinds of games. However since most of them rarely played games, owned macs and weren't very technically inclined, the games that had the least friction were generally the browser based ones.

Since party games by nature tend to be great at organic advertising and benefit the most from quick easy installs, I think there is a big opportunity here that not many have taken notice to yet.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#75

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".

That ship has sailed for at least a decade, and DCC applications like Photoshop or Maya were the forerunners of custom UIs.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#77
I'm conflicted. I love the technology and workflows that porting large apps to the browser bring you.

But this further moves us away from local first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

People sometimes talk about how crypto / bitcoin will decentralize things, but honestly we just need a better culture of native software. One that brings the best of what modern user interfaces and collaboration have to bring without the headaches of multi-OS development.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#78

> Why Photoshop came to the web The entire section is a deception. The real reason is to strong arm everyone into a subscription model where you never own the software that runs on your computer. That's the real end game, not this nonsense about how easy it is to launch an application if its a URL in a browser.

I've never met anyone who couldn't grasp the idea of programs running locally on a computer. Practcially every user of Android/iOS will understand it intuitevly. Back in the day anyone of all ages and abilities I knew on 90s-2000s hardware could download and install programs. Anyone who couldn't honestly wouldn't get much benefit from a computer.

Indeed, the convenience argument is just a pretext. They long to see the back of the days when you could buy Photoshop 7.0 for a one off fee and still use it today.

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#79

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, a…

The total asset size doesn't matter much (see Google Earth which is probably backed by terabytes of data), but how much new data the game needs to present to the player per second (which means the games needs to be designed for a minspec bandwidth just like it needs to be designed for a minspec CPU and GPU).

Re: Photoshop’s journey to the web

#80

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.

How would the problem of huge (dozens of GB) graphics assets be solved? Is there a current/planned way to have the large WASM binaries and assets stored on the computer?
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