So, my long standing beef with website subscription services is that they can't replicate the functionality of traditional desktop applications... and this article almost explains why. If only the CommonCraft show could explain it to people in plain english:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development
The fascinating thing about this article for me is that it points out the very specific issue with programming for the web... and yet, everyone is still trying to develop the "Artist Dashboard" now... MySpace wants one, Bebo wants one, it's the new buzz word in social networking. The Artist Dashboard. My personal favorite is the one http://www.Fuzz.com has built, it's elegant and clean, but it's simplistic too, it doesn't provide solutions for ALL the artist's daily problems.
But no one does, really.
In fact, I think it's a holy grail that can never be reached. There is no single system that addresses all the problems faced by an artist. Indie Band Manager comes closest in many respects, but does it handle digital distribution as well as CDBaby, iTunes or TuneCore? No! See what I mean? There's always something else... and if you add in everything the software becomes overly complex and unusable in a heartbeat.
Ah, the fine line. Therein lies the craft indeed.
The Artist Dashboard is a fantasy. Especially a web based one... one that works through a traditional browser. A new internet appliance will have to be developed instead. I believe it will be called a mainframe terminal.
The key sentence in the article I mentioned above is this one: "Web applications will always be way too much effort to get to reliably handle common business problems like data concurrency unless HTTP suddenly becomes a stateful protocol that maintains a persistent connection when idle, and HTML suddenly morphs into a great UI specification language."
What does that mean in plain english? It means "homey don't do that."
:o)
Browsers don't stay connected... they ask for info... and then let go. To reliably perform real business tasks the software can't ever let go... see what I mean? It has to always stay connected to the server.
And the even cooler thing is, Indie Band Manager can already do this. Pretty cool, eh? Maybe it is the new internet appliance after all.