I just presented a bunch of the new hardware-accelerated features of Flash Player 10 to RIA Meeting here in China and so it was kind of fortuitous that there’s a story on Techmeme about Adobe’s experiments with the GPU in Photoshop (make sure to read John Nack’s post for all of the disclaimers). Regardless of when/if some of these Photoshop GPU experiments make it into the final product, Adobe is starting to focus a lot more on the GPU – something that bodes well for applications on the desktop as well as the browser I think.

We’ve got a bunch of smart folks at Adobe doing innovative things with imaging, video, art, and development. Since Adobe bought Macromedia we’ve started to slowly (and in some cases quickly) see the worlds come together. We’re at the point now that teams are collaborating across products and mediums. The GPU folks in Photoshop can talk to the people working on hardware acceleration in Flash. So now we get that forward thinking filtering down in a lot of different places to a number of products, like the Flash Player, that hadn’t really tackled heavy GPU acceleration before.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to where we could be. Doing things like enabling the heavy duty features in Photoshop and After Effects to be exported directly to the Flash Player would be fantastic. But I think the Flash Player 10 release, and examples like Pixel Bender, show that the Adobe side and the Macromedia side are starting to move in lock-step. I can’t wait until that workflow lets us do some crazy Minority Report stuff. You just can’t do that without great tools and a great platform – Adobe has both.

Related posts:

1. The Future is Now – Adobe Photoshop Express
2. What Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends Report has for Adobe Developers
3. Adobe Open Screen Project – Open Specifications and Open Technology to Help Expand Flash Player Reach
4. Adobe at the Future of Web Apps Summit?
5. Sweet! Flickr Support for Photoshop Express is Coming