Checking out Photoshop for Chromebooks

In the computing industry's last chapter, Sun Microsystems had a motto: "The network is the computer." The phrase was open-ended enough to mean just about anything involving its main business, which was selling servers, but it wasn't enough to keep Sun from faltering and being swallowed up by Oracle. Adobe Systems' flagship software, which has become the industry standard for photo editing, is a fine example of old-era software dating back to the time when Microsoft ruled the roost.

Though it's one of Adobe's somewhat misleadingly named "Creative Cloud" products, it's actually run on a PC (and not from the cloud). Thus, it benefits from every processor cycle and megabyte of memory. Google Chromebooks - laptops running Google's Chrome operating system software - are from the very different era of Web-based software, where programs are housed in the cloud and run in the browser.

So how do Chromebooks and Photoshop come together? By running Photoshop on one of Google's central Compute Engine servers and piping the screen contents over the network to a Chromebook using a modified version of Google's Remote Desktop extension for Chrome. The laptop sends mouse clicks and keystrokes back up to the server for interpretation. It's very much the idea Sun failed to promote with its Sun Ray "thin clients," but now it's done with a Chrome extension and a modest network connection of at least 1 megabit per second (Mbps).