I too do not want Photoshop in a browser. I shoot Canon 5D and 5DMkII. My RAW images are HUGE. I'd either have to upload them to the server to "edit", or download a fairly hefty app to run locally. Photoshop (true photoshop) is processor and bandwidth intensive when used as intended. It won't live in the cloud for a very long time.
Now, what my parents and similar folks want is a way to reduce red-eye, crop and convert photos and apply some simple effects. Sure, THAT can be a web-app. But, the cloud is not killing photoshop.
I also personally do a lot of business travel. Until planes have free, good wifi, then "cloud apps" suck for me. I want to be able to read emails and queue responses while in-flight. I want to be able to edit and organize docs and presentations. I want to be able to look up an address or phone number from my inbox QUICKLY, without having to establish a wifi connection, accept some TOS for the free access, go to gmail, find the message, etc. Just pop open my MBP, give it 8 seconds to "wakeup", go to mail.app and pull the message I want.
In a few years I will likely be shooting .RAWs that are 50MB...
Some things are simply not meant to be done in the cloud. I think the right answer is to not fight the cloud OR the desktop appropriate applications. Developers should realize that for many markets, they may have to support both models to gain significant market share. Most companies have gained marketshare by customers what they want instead of forcing a particular model upon them...
Are you sure? At least in the US, hasn't broadband speed and cost been fairly static for the past five years. I'm not sure I would bet on super fat pipes solving all the problems with web applications.
Thin clients too- I don't think you can honestly expect that. The difference between using google docs and a native application is night and day. Docs is slow, prone to pauses, and has lots of bugs related to the poor mapping between html and page layout. Either the browser is going to get a lot faster, we're going to need /thicker/ clients, or people will stay with the status quo:
writing their documents in word, copying and pasting them into google docs only when they need an easy wiki.
In a few years time those will likely take less than a second to upload though.
If anything, Internet has been getting slower and slower due to congestion and server overloads. Upload speeds still haven't reached 100Kb/sec for 90% of the population after 10 years of affordable broadband arrival.
Pushing everything into a centralized location makes absolutely no sense. Not every byte on my hard drive needs to be shared with other people.
Instead we'll be moving towards rich browser runtimes, to allow on-the-fly downloaded&installed code to effectively work with local data.
I too do not want Photoshop in a browser. I shoot Canon 5D and 5DMkII. My RAW images are HUGE. I'd either have to upload them to the server to "edit", or download a fairly hefty app to run locally. Photoshop (true photoshop) is processor and bandwidth intensive when used as intended. It won't live in the cloud for a very long time.
Now, what my parents and similar folks want is a way to reduce red-eye, crop and convert photos and apply some simple effects. Sure, THAT can be a web-app. But, the cloud is not killing photoshop.
I also personally do a lot of business travel. Until planes have free, good wifi, then "cloud apps" suck for me. I want to be able to read emails and queue responses while in-flight. I want to be able to edit and organize docs and presentations. I want to be able to look up an address or phone number from my inbox QUICKLY, without having to establish a wifi connection, accept some TOS for the free access, go to gmail, find the message, etc. Just pop open my MBP, give it 8 seconds to "wakeup", go to mail.app and pull the message I want.