What is it? Not the “ubiquitous computing” I first imagined. Marginally handy in some ways, possibly more risky in others, e.g. if forget to exit on one machine (e.g. at work) then will it be accessible on another machine (e.g. at home or remote location)? An in any case, how sustainable will it be? My recent experience with Adobe CS Review makes me slightly wary…
What I expected was something more like the Kindle model, where I could install apps on as many devices as I wished, albeit with reduced functionality on weaker devices, and to have only one project open at a time, identically visible (apart from synch-delay) on all of those devices (maybe auto-branching where synch failed, with expectation of future manual pruning/re-synching).
Then there’s rendering – I’d expect that not to be counted as “usage”, instead usage should be actual user-interaction. The technical model could be a thin client for user interface, sending commands to processing engines (wherever, even on another machine, e.g. to run a muti-core / CUDA desktop from ipad or iphone) and at the same time “approval requests” to Adobe Central, but with some degree of “benefit of the doubt” time-window so as not to delay responsiveness of the application. They could then even respond to attempted beyond-licence actions with piecemeal license-extension options, e.g. “Provided you pay in next working day or two for temporary additional subscription” option (defaulters get credit score reduced). Why let inflexibility get in the way of capitalism?
Unfortunately, in the words of REM, “that was just a dream”. Instead activation is restricted virtually to the same degree as the non-cloud variety, that is to two computers (main & backup or work & home etc). The only extra freedom is that the two computers need not be the same operating system – e.g. can be mac and windows – a nuisance restriction of the traditional non-cloud model. And rendering counts as usage.
It is possible to deactivate one of these computers and reactivate on another but if this happens “too frequently” then a call to Adobe’s support office is required. It’s slightly more complicated in practice but that’s the essence of it.
Might give it a try though. Like I said, it could be marginally handy, and marginal is better than nothing.
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