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Cloud design

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 16:53

Tom Arah is impressed by Microsoft Live Mesh, and wonders just what Cloud-based computing could mean for the designer.

For example, I'm writing this on my notebook, in my living room using the copy of Word 2007 installed on my main PC in my home office; I can happily use InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge and so on, while completely forgetting that I'm working remotely. Actually, my notebook feels more responsive than usual, hardly surprising since it's effectively become a quad processor with plenty of RAM - and it feels as if it has the full Creative Suite installed when it doesn't!

There are some limitations: Remote Desktop doesn't currently support video or audio so Premiere Pro is out, and DirectX isn't supported, either, so the screen is black in Cinema 4D. And despite automatic scrolling and screen resizing, I do wish all my devices had the same screen resolution. However, these are small quibbles compared to the advantages. You don't actually need the software to be running locally on the desktop or in your client, you just need a live window to be able to see it and control it. The implications are huge - all I need to access my design files and design software from any device and with maximum power is one main system, surrounded by thin clients with remote desktop capabilities and decently fast data connections.

In fact, it's only the latter problem that currently prevents me from running my work system over the internet, but even that isn't insoluble: if full-screen video can be delivered over the internet then a smooth remote desktop connection certainly shouldn't be impossible (although 100% reliability is another matter). The main bottleneck is those cripplingly slow asynchronous broadband uplink speeds, and if you removed that restriction you should be able to work your actual office-based system from home, your garden, or even on holiday.

But why stop there? If your data and applications are both held remotely then, rather than maintain your own main system, storage, backup, applications and data connection, why not outsource them? A dedicated supplier would remove the asynchronous issue, ensure that you never run out of storage space, offer backup reassurance, and provide access to the latest versions of software across all your devices. More importantly, buying in your computing power this way from a shared datacenter offers huge scalability benefits, both in terms of cost and performance - forget quad processor, how about quadrillion?

The software that would benefit most from this performance boost would be the most demanding, so design applications aren't in fact excluded from the move into Cloud computing, but are likely to be its main beneficiaries. Imagine a 3D design tool, where the rendering farm is so vast that advanced ray tracing happens in real-time. Or how about applying advanced video effects in an instant. Suddenly, the online infrastructure that Adobe is building at Acrobat.com, complete with its own LiveConnect remote desktop capability, takes on new significance (or at least I hope it does).

Clearly, the precise way that Cloud-based computing will eventually be implemented and used by designers remains up in the air, and there's a real danger that things could still turn nasty with Microsoft and Adobe pursuing incompatible approaches, based on their respective Silverlight and Flash platforms. However, both companies protest their belief in open computing and interworking, and Live Mesh in particular is specifically designed to be extensible. For the moment, I'm allowing myself to dream of a single data mesh that automatically links and synchronises with online providers such as Adobe, Microsoft and Google, to enable online access to the latest versions of the most powerful design applications running on supremely powerful computing farms and accessible from any device with an internet connection. In fact, I'm imagining accessing all this power from a lightweight, tablet-based input device that can function anywhere - home, office, train and, yes, the most creatively inspiring environment of all, in bed. From this perspective, the future looks both cloudy and extremely bright.