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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

A lot of programs are effective as web apps, and they should be web apps, but there are a few that cannot be web apps, or function much worse:

* Image Edititing * Video Player * Chat * Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt * Software Developmnent * Music Player

Such things need to start fast and be easily accessible. The web has that problem - it does not start fast, and things tend to get lost among all the tabs and windows.

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Aren't video players and chat more popular on the web than they are in standalone apps?

Of the apps you listed, only image editing and software development seem like they have a future on the desktop, and software development only qualifies if you don't think there's going to be a sea-change in collaborative development and application deployment which will make people give up their favorite editors.

They're more popular when connected to a network, not the Web specifically. I know many more people use Skype for voice and video instead of Google Talk. Many people still download an MSN IM client and used web-based clients only when necessary (like at a school computer or if the desktop client is messed up).

software development only qualifies if you don't think there's going to be a sea-change in collaborative development and application deployment which will make people give up their favorite editors.

A few IDEs are already integrated with collaborative tools, and I'm sure someone could hack up some Emacs Lisp or VIM-script to add collaborative features to them.

The network, the Internet itself, is more important than any particular subset of it such as the Web/HTTP or SMTP.

I get that you can collaborate outside of a web browser, but it's so much easier to build collaborative tools that run in a browser that I think that's where the action's going to be. Compare SubEthaEdit to every online document editor.

Erm, it's not easier. The level of difficult is roughly the same. You're dealing with the same issues: user interface, network latency, etc.

I wrote my first non-trivial web app a while ago and my first reaction was "wow this is so much easier". Then I started getting into the finer details of actually getting useful performance out of the app with lots of concurrent users and faced all kinds of latency and bandwidth problems, plus problems with javascript behaving differently on different browsers. No longer so much easier.

While web apps seemed easier to start with and got me up and running a lot quicker than if I'd written a desktop app, I soon ran into the feeling that was programming on top of a bunch of different black boxes non of them actually designed to do what I wanted to do with them.

You don't need to run in a browser for "collaborative development and application deployment".

All of those, except perhaps for FTP/torrents, exist as web apps. They might not yet be on par with desktop apps, but I think it is obvious that they will be. As for the web not starting fast, going to gmail is faster than opening outlook for me.

http://www.net2ftp.com/

http://torrelay.com/

It works fairly well, though a while back (as I recall) they shifted from freemium to pay-based because they couldn't make enough money to operate otherwise (too many people using up limited bandwidth and not giving anything back).

I think for a lot of people now, Chat and Video player are moving to the web, soon after image editing.

I think it will be a while for Video editing, software development etc... but the direction is clear.

And of course, some things have to exist on the device but can be embedded in the web app.

Image Editing

Given that Adobe is betting the house on flash and the web would now be a good time to start a startup to create next generation Image Editing desktop application? Photoshop seems like the app that the interns are getting assign to maintain while the "cool" devs are off working on some web / flash projects.

Image Editing still has to run locally, you cannot have a request sent to the server everytime you resize an image or apply a filter. Yes, you can make it download-on-demand, as per flash, but it still needs to launch quickly, have fast and complete access to the local filesystem as well as the web, and this is a bit challenging to the current crop of browsers.

Exactly my point. So Adobe is going to invest their best developers and gobs of money trying to make a web based photoshop. What if I were to form a startup that made a new next-generation Desktop Image Editor based on Qt (cross platform ftw) with the goal of being able to surpass Photoshop.

I believe that has already been tried with Splashup

http://splashup.com/.

Your reply hint that Splashup is a desktop Image Editor that is set to take over Photoshop, but clicking on the link presents me with a POS flash app. Are you trying to say that Splashup already proved that Photoshop will fail to make a web app? It doesn't really matter because Adobe has drunk the Flash cool-aid and will make a Photoshop web app no matter how many have tried before because they will think they can do it better.

There is a market of at least 1, me, for a graphics editor that a smart (I understand the nature of graphics files), but non-trained (in photoshop) person can use. I've tried pixelmator a few times, but I have absolutely no idea how to use the damned thing. It looks simple enough. Yesterday, I opened an image and simply wanted to double the width, keeping the gradient "in tact". I couldn't even figure out how to select the area I needed (which was the whole of the image on the canvas).

So how about a "photoshop for programmers"?

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/nip2

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/vips-7.10/doc/nipbeginguide....

What makes you think that Adobe is abandoning Photoshop? Photoshop.com/Photoshop Express shares the branding, but it's an entirely different product targeted at an entirely different market.

there are of course applications like sumopaint.com that are quite good.

But they are a far cry from photohop, illustrator, 3Dmax, aftereffects and so on.

If anyone want's to create a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor that would use the browser's HTML as a canvas then I would be interested. Until that day, I am fine with apps like Fireworks for application and web design.

Adobe isn't abandoning Photoshop, but reading the financial reports it is pretty easy to figure out where management is steering the boat, devoting time and resources.

I've found http://pixlr.com/app/ to start faster that my Corel Paint Shop Pro and be more useful for quick touch ups etc. Only problem for me is the somewhat clunky interaction with my local files.

* Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt

The Transmission web GUI is actually very nice, but I suppose this method assumes a web server on a LAN, which for most people doesn't work

These are all 'commodity' applications that exist on all desktops. It's inevitable that free/open source versions will gradually replace their commercial counterparts, actually this is already happening:

* Image Edititing - GIMP (ok, ok, it still a long road to catch up with Photoshop, but it's already good enough for most users)

* Video Player - VLC & Co

* Chat - Pidgin

* Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt - uTorrent, Deluge, etc

* Software Developmnent - most tools are already free

* Music Player - Banshee, Amarok... event iTunes is free

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