I’ve found exactly what the title says: Rhapsody. A subscription music service from Real Networks. Yes, Real. I hated them as well. The Real Player was always updating itself, spewing messages, nagging me… it basically felt like high dollar spyware. I would avoid the format on the net like the Plague. I would *skip* seeing something cool on the net to avoid installing RealPlayer. Of course, I wasn’t the only one…

But, happy to report, Rhapsody doesn’t install/require RealPlayer (though it will RealAudio, I believe). That’s the principal reason I’d never even looked at the software, though my brother had raved about it for quite some time.

Well, last weekend I had long programming session in front of me and no desire to dig through my same library of albums in iTunes that I’d been staring at for the last year. My usual first stop is to Last.fm. Definitely my favorite web 2.0 radio station. I’ve even donated/subscribed for the year to get a bit more control and features. I tried Pandora (and pre-paid a year for $35, I think) when it first debuted (before I discovered last.fm, though I know last.fm was first). Its cool, too, and the more academic approach (as opposed to the census-style population sampling of Last.fm) is a fresh alternative — sometimes.

The problem with both is that you lack direct control over what you’re listening to, or rather you lack on-demand control. You can only influence and guide the music selection. I can’t jump straight to a particular album and track and play that whenever I want. With Rhapsody, I can.

Rhapsody gives the user a huge online library (millions of songs) that you can browse through and listen to on-demand. They also have the “channels” that are editorial crafted to fit certain criteria, e.g. 70’s Power Ballads, and they have an great implementation of playlists.

The playlist is a great thing. Its the modern day version of the mix tape. And on Rhapsody, you can leverage the “always on” nature of the application to share your playlists with other users (by e-mail, IM, URL, etc…) as well as throwing them on the pile for the general public. Users can rate playlists and the best in certain genres rise to the top. They also have “editorial” playlists presented by celebrities, musicians, music critics, site editors and music labels.

Rhapsody does a really good job of staying focused on one thing: the music. They effectively introduce all of the social networking elements while never letting the people get in the way. I know that sounds harsh, but its true. We can adopt (and adapt) a lot of important relational power from the mechanisms fine tuned in the world of MySpace, Facebook, et al. These ultra mainstream sites are teaching a lot of powerful organizational functions to the average web user. The ones who are doing it wrong are taking MySpace and sticking feature X in place of the bands: videos, games, shopping, TV shows, music. The ones who are doing it right, like Rhapsody, maintain a focus and keep the users on the sidelines, where they honestly belong (or rather, behind-the-scenes).

In other words, its very satisfying to live in a social space, but I don’t necessarily want to wade through the egos and personalities every time. With Rhapsody, music (at its core, a single track/song) is the participant in the social network. Us fans are just along for the ride!

So, these are great features, but probably what you’d expect (its basically iTunes with a giant library on the net). Its subscription vs. possession. But the main reason I usually have a problem with subscription web services is that they’re useless without the web. Sure, I may not be without the web much these days when using a computer (my e-mail is web-based as well), but for my music… well, I want to be able to listen to it *anytime* or anywhere I’ve got a wall outlet or a battery. Like my iPod, or the MP3 ripped to my desktop.

Well, Rhapsody allows you to “cache” any or all of your library to disk. I believe they use WMA DRM to “secure” the music. Which you know what? That’s fine. I can’t put it on my iPod. I can’t copy it to a CD and drop it in the mail to a friend. But *I* can listen whenever I want. And I’m fine with that limitation because its only $15 a month.

So, Rhapsody is radio on demand. And its a better iTunes. If I want to own music, I’ll buy the CD off of Amazon. If I just want to listen to music, I’ll look it up on Rhapsody.

Have I mentioned how much I like Flex? The ActionScript3 (EMCAScript/JavaScript) language is a pleasure to program in (garbage collected, dynamic *and* static typing, single-inheritance class hierarchies and built in XML (E4X) manipulation). Flex Builder 2 (which is Eclipse) is a spectacular IDE (trumping, dare I say, VS.NET 2003, my prior fave, but only with Visual Assist — Visual Assist still trumps all). And the inclusion of declarative (MXML) programming hits a perfect sweet spot in my long time HTML coder’s heart. It just seems perfect.

You know, kinda like exactly what I said would be the perfect game development environment back in March 2006. I sung the praises of the mindshift in software development brought on my “web 2.0″ where production-quality development truly is agile: they divide the problem into structure, behavior and styling. Of course. The Holy Trinity of Interaction. You find it time and time again when you dissect anything one would describe as interactive: model-view-controller, input-process-output, listen-think-speak… structure, behavior and styling.

To recap: structure defines the layout of things, their relationships, both spatially and conceptually; behavior consumes the structure, plays on the structure like monkeybars, moves through it. And styling determines how the structure is presented, provides feedback, expresses.

In practical software development terms, I’ve discovered that means one needs a declarative language (MXML), an imperative language (ActionScript3), and support for skinning and/or style sheets (Flash, CSS). Flex bundles all three together.

Of course, it has a good application framework provided out of the box (that’s free, in fact, along with the compiler… you just pay if you want the IDE, which is Eclipse, so you’re actually just paying for the visual MXML editor, which is probably worth it, but certainly not required if you’re patient or are experience with HTML/CSS). I can’t imagine if there was a gamedev framework for it… that’d be sweet.

Chalk up one for Adobe (via Macromedia): Adobe Flex 2 is the finest software development kits — nay, platform! — that I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with. And this coming from a guy who’s spent the last five years convincing game studios to adopt a commercial SDK (RenderWare), so I can smell my own kind… and I don’t smell Flex at all! Clean as a whistle…

I think they will seriously give C#.NET a run for its money. Sure, C#.NET is probably faster on a Windows box, no doubt about that… but is it that much faster? And .NET certainly doesn’t have the Flash graphics engine backing it up (your toolchain is already finished!). And it only really works on MS devices. And you have to download and install (and in Vista, enter an admin password!) because its a native EXE with all of the potential problems.

While Flash… well, Flash is ubiquitous. Hell, it’s more standardized across user machines than Java or web browser and most certainly operating system. And your input, output and everything in-between is identical on whatever platform your user is using.

And, and, and… it’s all sorts of integrated with and designed to a leverage the always-on-net-connection world that many, many of us live in.

Go now, you can buy it off the shelf. I did. Best $500 I’ve spent in a long time. No regrets.

No one likes working for “The Man.” I previously worked for “The Man” of our little industry, Electronic Arts. And then I was indie… and now, I work for “The Man” again.

Or, rather, I work for “The Bird.”

Last week, in a humble little legal procedure called “incorporation,” a quasi-real (but wholly legal) entity was formed in the Great State of Delaware. Its first act as a corporate entity was to hire myself and my business partner and appoint us officers of the corporation with all rights and obligations thereof.

So, I guess I’m officially employed now. Employed by the corporate entity that only exists on paper and in our imagination. At least I hold a controlling interest!

Our little guy was born last week, simultaneously incorporated in the halls of Delaware as he was given form in the notebooks of our concept artists. His image is lurking about the web (find it if you can!), but I’ll leave you with just the name for now: Mockingbird Games, Inc.

I guess it’s official, huh?