This may be the future of computing in the post-PC era. Embedded in this page is a fully functional copy of Adobe Photoshop running in the cloud using the Mainframe2 interface to Amazon Web Services’ EC2 graphical cloud that I mentioned last week and the week before.

You can’t (yet) upload your own pictures to this demo but you can open pre-loaded files and manipulate them as you like. Try it on Windows or Mac using Safari or Chrome for now (more html5 browsers coming including those for Android and iOS). No plugins!  Let me know how it works for you. And remember this application was ported to the cloud in about 10 minutes.

I’ll be especially interested to hear from readers outside the USA to see if latency issues kill the experience.

For today the servers all run from Amazon EC2 US West (it should be live in EC2 US East shortly, just not today). Very soon, they’ll be connecting people to the closest Mainframe2 server.

For this demo and to keep things simple they are not enabling a “bring your own file” feature, but will be rolling out support for Dropbox, Box, and all other major cloud storage solutions soon.  Here’s a video showing how it will run with Box, for example.

What will this mean for your applications?