Oh joy, a website built entirely in Flash!

Adobe today launched Adobe Photoshop Express, a public beta web application, and although it’s called “Photoshop”, don’t let the name fool you. This is *not* an online version of Adobe’s venerable flagship photo-editing application. It’s more of a web app for storing, sharing, and doing some light editing to your photos...like an online version of Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto.

My initial reaction is... Why?

Does anybody need an online version of these two very capable desktop apps? Have people really been clamoring for a way to edit their photos in their web browsers? Is there an advantage that I’m not seeing in uploading your photos and *then* editing them, rather than editing your photos and then uploading them?

Even if you look at Photoshop Express simply as a way to present your photos, it is disappointingly simple compared to even Apple’s bare-bones-yet-elegant .Mac web galleries, much less the robust experience of a service like Flickr. As far as I can tell, the only way to browse someone’s photos is in a very simple slideshow mode, whereas Apple offers several clever viewing options and Flickr is simply a whole ‘nother ballgame, with nested sets and collections, tags, metadata, advanced search, and much more.

I’d be tempted to call Photoshop Express a Web 2.0 application, except for the fact that it completely eschews one of the ideals behind Web 2.0 by being built and presented entirely in Adobe’s proprietary Flash, rather than standards-based technologies like AJAX and PHP that you find in most Web 2.0 properties, such as Flickr.

I suppose it would be naive to expect anything else from Adobe, but the Flash-based nature of Photoshop Express makes it an absolutely miserable web experience for me. The whole app, as with most Flash-based websites, is very slow. And you can forget about using the forward and back buttons in your browser or any of the several ways you might normally navigate through a web page (arrow keys, space bar, mouse scroll wheel, page down key, etc.) which, from a UI perspective, is simply unconscionable. Not being able to scroll through a listing of galleries with my mouse wheel is maddening. I can’t remember the last time I actually had to grab the window sidebar to scroll. There’s a good reason nobody uses Flash as a web design platform anymore.

I just don’t get it. Perhaps Adobe is desperately looking for reasons to prop Flash up under a steady assault from open web standards such as AJAX and H.264, and from Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPod touch. Perhaps they think this is the killer app that will keep Flash relevant for the next decade, and designers locked into Adobe’s proprietary platform.

On a recent episode of the Mac Break Weekly podcast, Andy Ihnatko held up Photoshop Express as a reason that Apple needs to have Flash on the iPhone, but with all due respect to Andy, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use this service on a desktop browser, much less on the OS X touch platform.