This may be the future of computing in the post-PC era. Embedded in this page is a fully functional copy of Adobe Photoshop running in the cloud using the Mainframe2 interface to Amazon Web Services’ EC2 graphical cloud that I mentioned last week and the week before.
You can’t (yet) upload your own pictures to this demo but you can open pre-loaded files and manipulate them as you like. Try it on Windows or Mac using Safari or Chrome for now (more html5 browsers coming including those for Android and iOS). No plugins! Let me know how it works for you. And remember this application was ported to the cloud in about 10 minutes.
I’ll be especially interested to hear from readers outside the USA to see if latency issues kill the experience.
For today the servers all run from Amazon EC2 US West (it should be live in EC2 US East shortly, just not today). Very soon, they’ll be connecting people to the closest Mainframe2 server.
For this demo and to keep things simple they are not enabling a “bring your own file” feature, but will be rolling out support for Dropbox, Box, and all other major cloud storage solutions soon. Here’s a video showing how it will run with Box, for example.
What will this mean for your applications?
I wish my vm’s were as responsive at times. This is really amazing.
This looks like what Marc Andreessen was going to do with Netscape before Bill Gates’ Microsoft undercut him.
Absolutely amazing! WOW!!!
Surprisingly responsive. I kept getting a lot of “Disconnected… Reconnecting” type of messages, but it’s really amazing how quickly it was ready to go. Sluggish, sure, but thats network latency. Certainly works a lot better than most remote desktop programs over the same connection. The low resolution and low color depth would be _brutal_ for photoshop though. It would need to be properly color calibrated if a pro wanted to use it. Otherwise, beautiful for those of us who just want some short term usage of an app.
Bob, you were asking about the user experience outside the USA. I am based in Edinburgh, Scotland (over 5,000 miles away from the server according to a dialog that appeared when I opened the app, warning me that I may indeed experience severe latency). Clicking and dragging the mouse, e.g. using the paintbrush, has a little too much lag to be frustration-free. That said, other actions such as menu selection and applying filters happen quickly enough. Perhaps when US-East hosting comes online, it will improve.
To put my experience in context, speedtest.net reports a 168ms ping to San Jose, CA for me; 31Mbps down, and 1.97Mbps up.
In Texas, 1463 miles, about 1/4 second lag, no disconnects. Impressive.
Great responsiveness and overall experience from Spain (5800 miles away it said). Very impressive.
Works pretty well, I am over 5100 miles away from the server in England and it was certainly useable although there was slight lag. I’d love to try it with AutoCAD one day as I am more familiar with that to give it a thorough test.
From Australia, I am getting a “Mainframe2, the worlds largest computer, is currently overloaded. Please try again later. Fingers crossed”
With the latest Chrome under Linux it says it isn’t supported. Not impressed. A true HTML5 app wouldn’t care which OS it was on.
Works quite nice from Helsinki, Finland. Totally usable, a slight delay in how things responded, did not bother me using this demo, but could be a turnoff after heavier use.
Nuremberg Germany 5777 miles away. Its not the fastest beast on the planet but it is totally workable. There is a tiny bit of lag but not much different or worse if you were doing some PS work and say listening to some music or transferring files or something similar. I am on 50 down 10 up connection. This is really really good.
Doesn’t work on Firefox (Any OS) and Linux (Any Browser). :S
The online Photoshop session was too short to get a feel for the system.
I would like to review this as a writer and also try some experimental comparisons. For example, have two groups of students do the same image editing task — one online, the other on the desktop — and compare the experience and completion times. (I’m a professor).
Will we be able to import arbitrary applications or will they have to be included by Mainframe 2 staff? Where are things like preferences and inter-session state info stored? Lots of questions …
Is this the BIG news? Or will you be posting something else before the day is out (in your timezone)? Thought we were going to find out about the long lost episodes of NerdTV or the StartUp tour….
The first question that comes to mind is how well will this compare with the new AWS WorkSpaces.
Hi everyone — thanks for your comments.
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If you can’t connect at the moment, try again in a few minutes — we’re getting hit by thousands of users from all over the world. Sessions are limited to a couple of minutes to give everyone a chance to try it. But you can start it again right away.
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We’ll support all HTML5-compliant browsers on all OSs at launch. Chrome and Safari for this preview.
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AWS Workspaces is Desktop-as-a-Service, and we’re not really bullish on Win7 desktop. AWS Appstream is more similar to Mainframe2, but without some key features — most important being that it doesn’t and it won’t run in a browser (when it becomes available).
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I see lots of users from Europe, our plan is to have servers in Europe shortly (by the end of the year).
Regards,
Nikola Bozinovic
Founder, Mainfame2
I’m in Hawaii, 2883 miles away (according to what they said), and I saw no latency at all. That was pretty cool.
impressive, though took 3 attempts to get in do to load, according to Hal.
Do we really want to go back to Timesharing? its a far cry from vt100 or 3278s, but wasn’t the PC revolution proof that we don’t want to share?
That ship has sailed. While I am old enough to remember and still want the my machine, my data experience, I understand what is happening. Those who don’t remember why the PC happened, want the don’t-bother-me experience of no longer having to be concerned with disk space, installations, etc. Plus mobile devices are not quite there with power yet.
The pendulum swings; in 10-20 years everyone will wonder why we let those internet companies control our digital destinies. Actually Dave Winer is thinking the swing back has already started…
Good catch. Check, check, check. Mainframes : Platform shoes + bell-bottom pants.
Had to install Chrome to try it (won’t work in Firefox). Took nearly 30 seconds just to select a brush and draw a line – then it shut me off.
The future doesn’t seem to be here yet!
Something that only runs in particular browsers is as bad as all that ActiveX junk that would only run in IE.
As explained a few posts above “We’ll support all HTML5-compliant browsers on all OSs at launch. Chrome and Safari for this preview.” Regarding ActiveX, it made the difference between usable and unusable video back in 1999 from an Axis webcam. Back then IE with ActiveX was the de facto standard.
From Australia 7428 miles away. On Chrome.
It loads quickly, but latency is making it impractical to use – but still impressive.
I could select a brush, and do some drawing, but the lag was at least a couple of seconds.
I’m sure with some local services it would be brilliant.
Doesn’t support Safari 5.1.10 on OS X 10.6.8. (Although it’s the “latest” version of Safari for OS X 10.6.8, it’s not the “LATEST” version.)
New Zealand. some lag and jitter but overall entirely usable.
extremely impressive.
Holy crap that sucker is fast! I wouldna thunk. Beats a crappy MS RD on VPN any day.
Useless:
Your browser is not supported.Mainframe2 Beta supports the latest Chrome (Windows/Mac) or Safari (Mac).
[…] Link. I thought we did this with Citrix in 90s. […]
So, less than a thousand miles away and using Mavericks it was v.fast. Not full desktop, but I didn’t ask a lot of it either…
Great… another awesome cloud use for my limping cable internet connection.
Bob..I’m 5819 miles away in Switzerland. Good response so definitely usable even at this stage.
Never got past the Adobe licensing popup – none of the buttons did anything.
It warned me I was X thousand miles away from the server, do I want to continue?
Not useful, seemingly 🙁
#Australia
I’m in Perth Western Australia (reported distance 9166 miles from server).
Unfortunately my 2 minutes expired before the photoshop app finished loading. I never got to see the actual file to edit. I’m on a 30Mbps+ cable link via Telstra, our national carrier on a maxed out Macbook pro retina on Mavericks. Our nearest AWS / EC2 data centre is Sydney, which is on the East Coast of Australia about 2500 miles away so maybe there is hope in the future.
Not a usable experience at present based on this test – but a great idea none the less.
As an Apple Distinguished Educator in the most isolated Capital City in the world, I see this concept has great promise in education…
Nothing happens and then I’m prompted to leave feedback. Chrome Version 33.0.1703.0 canary
Very responsive in San Diego. I immediately got the response “Your browser is not supported.” Looking forward to the official release. Any word on cost yet and how it compares with free alternatives? 🙂
That was incredibly impressive for not requiring any plugins. I’m about ~1400 miles away from the nearest datacenter but it worked pretty flawlessly for me (Chrome 30.0.1599.101 m). Effects applied quickly and even 3D Layer manipulation was usable (equivalent to trying to do that on a mid-level laptop right in front of me). I’m definitely interested in seeing how this develops.
Side note: I wonder how they got Adobe to sign off on the licensing for this? What license would even cover making an application accessible to the entire internet lol
9000 plus kilometers away and surprisingly usable. Very short time to try though, kicked me off after two minutes.
Am in Beijing and using Safari, the video says that my browser is not supported…
I presume that running the video starts the demo test?
Unfortunately uploading your own picture is a very relevant part of the experience: a RAW file for a 20+Mpixel camera is 15+MBytes – hardly anyone here in the USA has more than 1 Mbit upload speed at home. That means uploading this picture takes 2 minutes. This makes the hole idea pretty theoretical for serious photographers – and for simple snapshots there are plenty of photo editors available on phones/tablets/PCs.
The future is so bright for the cloud that only those who need to use sunshades professionally will not participate in it.
Everyone that has pictures and data (for other applications) that have no privacy or intellectual property requirements will go to apps on the cloud, assuming the economics are still valid, the latency is OK and the costs are lower than open source free software maintenance. Anyone else who wants to keep data out of the hands of the NSA, the government, competitors, your wife, etc. will stay off the cloud unless they find someone in the cloud they trust or have a contract that protects them and is also immune to local government searches and subpoenas.
The TSA and almost other 3 letter agencies only use local copies of GIMP. That should tell the anyone else crowd everything they need to know. 🙂
Something like 7856 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, and found the latency barely noticeable – admittedly only using some basic tools, but impressive nonetheless. Bring it on!
Very responsive in Pennsylvania (2800+ miles away). No noticeable lag using healing brush on the lemon picture. Pretty cool..
It seemed to be usable at 7869 miles away (Melbourne Australia) but it was slow on the screen refresh – still better than using some other graphics apps. Worked in Chrome but not Safari.
In Sydney, Australia, 8094 miles. Too laggy to use effectively. I would be killing someone after 10 minutes. Seems to have potential for casual use if the servers are (much!) closer.
As an aside, I’m not sure why it thinks Melbourne is closer than Sydney.
From Canberra, Australia (7500 miles away), the delay is painful. When drawing a simple line, the actual line appears a long way behind my actual mouse … making the UX horrible. Drove me nutz; I had to stop it after about 60sec.
Tried from India (5800 miles away)
Impressive. response and definitely usable.
Could not test thoroughly as the session was short.
I still need a desktop computer to run the app in the cloud. I’d rather have a local copy of Photoshop. I would only use this if I was enchanted with the technology, kind of like Bob’s old example of someone using a phone because they like the phone technology rather than to actually talk to someone. Maybe in the future Mainframe will be more compelling…
“I still need a desktop computer to run the app in the cloud.” Isn’t that because a desktop PC is the only device you currently have with a large display/keyboard that includes a browser? Suppose your phone ran the same browser and could be docked to a large display/keyboard?
I actually tried it first on an iPad, but of course that version of Chrome isn’t supported. If it’s more compelling in the future, like your scenario of working on a phone with keyboard and display, I’d probably start using it and wind up depending on it in time….
Serbia, 6k+ miles away from server, and work without lag.. great exp for beta relase, and i waiting for more..
now i use my personal desktop computer over teamviewer with my phone much more than phone inbuilt programs ( even a browser! ), much of my files are on cloud storage ( dropbox, gdrive, etc ) and this option to run apps on cloud with cloud storage aval is what i need for my usual use.
realy the best idea and realisation until now, good wishes for next steps!
pozdrav i podrska!
Did you know some Mainframe2 development is done in Serbia? It’s pretty much a Serbian company.
6139 miles, Croatia, almost no lag at all… I colud draw with a brush easily. Nice work! Looking forward to see CAD programs…
Amsterdam about 6000 miles. Quite a bit of lag but way better than other virtualized apps and desktops I tried. I imagine this being really great with a local server.
Would love to access my CAD applications and Render software anywhere from my phone, connect to whatever available display and bluetooth keyboard + mouse. Awesome stuff!
It worked fine on 100/40 NBN from AUS east coast. Impressive. Only wee bit of lag on dragging a window around and opening them as expected.
Hi, hailing from Israel here. I have a good internet pipe, but I’m 10 timezones away from the west coast. Additionally, I am running a BitTorrent client full stream in the background with 90% of my upload dedicated to it (just for testing latency of course).
That said, the experience is AWESOME! latency is noticeable but not too high, around 200-300ms or so.
Italy, 5949 miles away. Menu selection is quick while I’ve experienced some lag in more complex processes, but it’s entirely usable. I’m impressed.
5,256 miles (Berwick-Upon-Tweed UK) filters never loaded – unusable
Am based in India (8,000 miles away). The app did load but there was a lag. Before I could do anything meaningful, the preview ended.
Suggestion: If you notice folks are far away and on connections that you detect as not fast enough, allow a little more time for the preview. 🙂
Tried in in Google Chrome on my Chromebook and got the message the browser was not supported
Impressed, nothing much to say about latency in NYC
I whish I could full screen the App itself and not Mainframe2!
What’s the number to dial in with my modem?
Wow! Here in NJ, no latency whatsoever. Absolutely amazing!!!
Is this the “big news coming Thursday”?
Sofia, Bulgaria, works like a charm!
Impressed!!! I’m in Mexico, there was too much lag.
This is really amazing, starting of new way to purchase and use software.
Little latency, but not a big deal.
Excited to see what else coming up in future, other than Photo softwares.
Basel, Switzerland — no noticeable lag!
Worked great from Toronto (~2200 miles away according to the message). Pretty cool!
What will this mean for your applications?
I can’t try it, because my environment is not set up as required, and I’m not going to go to all the trouble to arrange things just for this demo.
However, I really don’t see the point. PCs are cheap, and photo-editing software is free (GIMP). You have to have a decent-sized screen, etc., for photo editing, etc. – this is not an application, generally speaking, for a smartphone. So you still end up with running it in your office, where your equipment is. The latency MIGHT be good enough – but on a PC it is certainly good enough. So why bother with this? (I realize it means you can plug into hardware anywhere, but how many people really walk into someone else’s office and want to start photo-editing? I’m sure there are people in that position, but not many.)
There might be a killer app for this, but I don’t see it being photo-editing, at least until big screens become portable.
I live in Santiago, Chile (5942 miles away). For me, it was *a bit* slow, but pretty decent.
Several data centers are located here and more are being built. If this were to have servers running here, it would probably run well.
I can’t help but wonder how good will this be for *gaming*.
I’m in rural western New Mexico (redundant, I know), 895 miles from the redirected server, with no better than 1Mbps down and .15 up. For the two minutes of the demo I was able to do three or four edits, rotate, edit, and it didn’t seem much different than my bloated Photoshop experience. I’m impressed.
got a message that my browser was slow to respond, cpu pegged at 100%, machine pretty much locked up. unable to do anything with the app. Not a hit so far for me!
As a “mainframe1” guy in central Canada (1500 miles) on 50Mbps carrier, very impressed, no significant difference from running the same thing locally.
Worked “okay,” though I’m just here in the States. Not laggy enough to be a problem, but not snappy enough to feel it was great. But it would absolutely be adequate in a pinch and if/when lacking the software on one’s own device.
On one hand, I’m impressed this does work in a browser as well as it does. On the other hand, it’s simply an MS Paint knockoff, not a Photoshop knockoff, and those are worlds apart. Managing layers and thousands of fonts are where the online value will be, as the kinds of simple manipulation program shown here can be done on a low-end tablet or smartphone.
Amazon’s AWS uses PCoIP, a proprietary protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCoIP . So one advantage of Mainframe2 is that it’s immediately available to anyone with a device running a browser. But if a device were capable of using PCoIP, it would not have the burden of simultaneously running a browser in order to use its html5 protocol. Since AWS can be used with many devices, I assume Amazon’s license for PCoIP includes its installation and use on those devices. So I’m curious as to how these services compare w.r.t. cost/performance. Either way, we’re using a cloud program by transmitting compressed images over the internet.
I hate to be a naysayer, but I have to agree with the other poster who pointed out that the demo is more akin to MS Paint than Photoshop. As a consultant who works with ad agencies, as well as using Photoshop for my own personal projects, I can say that this is not a very accurate test. The test image is (if I remember correctly) 800×540 pixels at 72 dpi. Try using the Resize command and increase it to something more reasonable like 1900×1285 and then try using some of the other commands. I found that doing this increased lag significantly.
Also, as previously pointed out, what happens when you start working with layers in Photoshop? I just looked back at a typical file that I created and it was 504 MB with 27 layers, several of which are effects layers which dynamically modify the display of the image on-the-fly. I have a feeling that file would be a little lag-gy over even a fast connection.
True, a file like the one above is way beyond what the typical user would be working with. However, we are at a time when a new iPhone captures pictures at 3264 x 2448 resulting in a 2.5 MB file. Working remotely in the cloud with files like that is sure to be much more taxing than what we are seeing in the demo.
My two cents.
From the east coast of the US, it’s reporting that I’m 1300+ miles away from the server. For the minute or two that the demo ran, I had no problems drawing, rotating, or resizing. I noticed no latency.
Shut up and take my money!
Finally no virtualization / streaming hassle… and above all no plug-ins.
This is very important for corporations, where security may restrict access or installation of browser add-ons.
There have been some attempts to do something like this, but with too many limitations or constraints.
If the partnership with software vendors will be well managed, this could be our next choice!