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Comment by jokermatt999 | Hacker News Reader

The combination of these two has got me thinking. Not in the Wired-style "Clearly everything will be on the cloud and we will have no need for harddrives!" techno-optimist style, but just that you pretty much can do this if you want.

LastPass and XMarks or Firefox Sync (and I think Chrome has similar) takes care of keeping your browser the same, independent of location. Dropbox can keep your important files where ever you want (up to some size). Netflicks and various music streaming services can take care of media being ubiquitous. Email and other communications are more often than not tied to an online provider.

So, what parts of your computer can't you get from cloud services if you want? Gaming still seems to be a large one, although OnLive supposedly fixes that. Large applications like Photoshop aren't necessarily replaceable by WebApps. What else?

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We're very close to being able to replace a personal computer with cloud-based services, but the technology to replace a workstation is still in its infancy. We've got things like WebGL and Google Native Client, but they're immature and can't yet be strung together to easily make something like a 3d content creation app. Amazon's EC2 now offers GPGPU instances, but there are no frameworks to help me port my scientific computing app to use EC2 as a backend and WebGL as a front-end. (And I'd be out of luck if I wanted to visualize a resulting data set that exceeded 4GB: I'd have to shift all or part of the rendering pipeline to the cloud, and WebGL means it would be all or nothing.) It also seems a bit absurd that we still need something more than a web browser to do web development.

The other big thing lacking is integration: I can't save a Google Doc directly to my Dropbox account, proper OpenID support isn't widespread, when Photoshop does come to the cloud, I definitely won't be able to upload directly to Picasa and Flickr, and nobody seems to be interested in enabling the seamless (secure) sharing of data between web apps.

Aviary Phoenix is pretty good as a Photoshop web app: http://www.aviary.com/tools/image-editor

I've been using Aviary as a last-ditch backup for a few years now. It's never been my go-to tool on a machine that I control, but at work, it will often be just enough. I would like to see better wacom compatability with their tools (eg: pressure sensitivity), and more accessible Bezier control points for their SVG tool.

Chrome does have a sync, but it syncs more than just bookmarks: Apps, form fill, etc.

Also, don't give up on a web photoshop just yet!

For some reason though, Chrome doesn't sync passwords.

My Chrome Sync duplicates bookmarks and often deletes them too... On both XP and OS X.

Steam solves a portion of the gaming problem.

However, Steam doesn't take care of syncing your game profiles, saves, etc. That would be worth paying extra for IMO.

Actually, for some games, Steam will do that too! I don't know when the released it, but if you look in your Steam Library, if the game has a little cloud icon next to it, your saved games and other settings will be shared between computers. Right now on my screen, COD2, Torchlight, Dawn of War II, and a few others all do this.

If you go to the Steam menu -> Settings -> Downloads+Cloud, then check the box for enabling steam sync for games that support it.

You mean something like this? http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/ov_cloud.php

It was introduced to Left 4 Dead late 2008. I'm not sure how widely it's used at this point.

In settings you can enable it at the bottom of the Downloads + Cloud tab.

Here's a list of which games currently support the Steam Cloud. http://www.giantbomb.com/steam-cloud/92-4581/games/

or you could save your games in a dropbox folder - works great for the couple of steam games I own

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