At its annual Adobe Max conference, Adobe announced plans to bring a complete version of Photoshop to the iPad in 2019.
Photoshop CC for iPad will feature a revamped interface designed specifically for a touch experience, but it will bring the power and functionality people are accustomed to on the desktop.
This is the real, full photoshop – the same codebase as the regular Photoshop, but running on the iPad with a touch UI. The Verge’s Dami Lee and artist colleagues at The Verge got to test this new version of Photoshop, and they are very clear to stress that the biggest news here isn’t even having the “real” Photoshop on the iPad, but the plans Adobe has for the PSD file format.
But the biggest change of all is a total rethinking of the classic .psd file for the cloud, which will turn using Photoshop into something much more like Google Docs. Photoshop for the iPad is a big deal, but Cloud PSD is the change that will let Adobe bring Photoshop everywhere.
This does seem to be much more than a simple cash grab, and I’m very intrigued to see if Adobe finally taking the iPad serious as a computing platform will convince others to do so, too – most notably Apple.
On Windows and macOS Adobe has this annoying uncanny cross platform UI framework they use, which is terrible on both platforms (it can’t even get scrolling direction right on Windows…). I’d prefer it if they’d spend their time porting from that waste of time and effort to something more native on both of the desktop/laptop platforms, rather than spend time porting to a half arsed computer like an iPad.
Edited 2018-10-16 20:39 UTC
Too bad. The iPad is only limited because Apple themselves don’t seem to see in it the potential the rest of us do. I’m actually with Thom on this one: maybe Adobe can give Apple the kick in the pants they need to really make the iPad what it’s always had the potential to be. Of course, with bean counter Cook in charge instead of a real leader, it probably won’t happen.
Impressive, though I tend to use keyboard shortcuts a lot to get things done faster, so it would appear there’s a bit of relearning there.
It looks like they are planning to incorporate keyboard shortcuts in a future release. That would further prove Adobe is serious about turning the iPad Pro into an actual “Pro” device.
That’d be very nice. Will be very keen to see how well they can align the code base across all platforms. I’d hope that the iPad versions don’t lag behind.
The nice thing is it won’t rely on the crappy cross platform UI toolkit they developed. Maybe there’s some home it’ll get ported back to macOS after.