Last week Adobe announced they were going to have an ad-supported Photoshop web version, a territorial move to (try and) cut off Google from moving in. From Adobe’s point of view this is smart but from a customer using Photoshop, I’m not sure how much graphics work I’d do online.

I enjoy working with graphics offline as I do with writing longer creative works. I don’t mind using online docs programs for short works like letters, blog posts, shorter articles, etc. There is a place for online versions of spreadsheets, wordprocessers, but … Photoshop online?

This morning I needed to resize six avatars for our group blogging project and tried using mypictr. I can see doing quick graphics work like this online. The process took only a few seconds and it was hassle free.

I have almost zero interest using an ad-supported version of Photoshop online and signs are pointing that it will be targeted at “casual users” like what I used mypictr for this morning. Thing is I didn’t see any ads at MyPictr. Maybe if I dug around that site more, I’d find them.

Whatever happens Adobe, please, please, please don’t add chat or some other socially intrusive functions to be part of the cool crowd.

How many ‘my’ pages can one have?
Personally I think the technology web is becoming too social. We don’t need to and shouldn’t share everything we’re doing every day. I don’t want to have friends lists and “my.domain.com” pages for every website I visit, especially when I have to repeat most of the same information across the same sites. My pages are the websites we own/operate, not places at Netscape/AOL, Yahoo and beyond.

And from a creative standpoint, sometimes I enjoy going offline and working on things in peace without the distractions of social interaction. Don’t you? Sometimes?

Not trying to be anti-social because there are also times I’m looking to get involved and check out what others are doing and I do enjoy sharing with others. But not sharing everything. And I’m not sure how any of the social stuff that is the attention magnet for a lot of online apps makes Photoshop better.

Maybe professional designers and artists feel differently? Maybe they can point to missing social parts of Photoshop that only a new online version with ads could offer? Collaborative design on large projects makes sense, but for smaller design firms, I don’t see collaboration features being anything but in the way. Am I missing something?

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