We actually spent a *lot* of time discussing this before building the product. I've been an HTML+JavaScript "Ajax" programmer for several years now, and I was hesitant to consider Flash for this application. As with any web application, you often have to make engineering tradeoffs for biggest install-base versus most interactive versus easiest to build. The biggest factor in our decision was audio -- Flash has by far the best cross-platform, cross-browser, zero-install environment for scripting audio.
I can definitely say it was the best choice. The thought of engineering "Ajax" components to script audio that work across as many platforms as possible (not to mention all the audio transcoding involved on the server side) gives me heart palpitations. We regularly have customers applauding us for the fact that our product works on Linux, Mac, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Win, IE, the list goes on. It even works on lots of platforms we don't officially "support" and never tested on. Getting that reach with typical Ajax+JavaScript simply couldn't have happened.
At the same time I understand the sentiment. I hope eventually we'll have time to build DHTML versions of Pandora in addition to Flash -- it's all matter of time and resources.
I'll make a guess that you're using Firefox with Flash 6. For some people that combo doesn't work so well. If you upgrade Flash, you'll get song/artist that updates when the songs change. (And it'll be a bit zippier.;)
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We actually spent a *lot* of time discussing this before building the product. I've been an HTML+JavaScript "Ajax" programmer for several years now, and I was hesitant to consider Flash for this application. As with any web application, you often have to make engineering tradeoffs for biggest install-base versus most interactive versus easiest to build. The biggest factor in our decision was audio -- Flash has by far the best cross-platform, cross-browser, zero-install environment for scripting audio.
I can definitely say it was the best choice. The thought of engineering "Ajax" components to script audio that work across as many platforms as possible (not to mention all the audio transcoding involved on the server side) gives me heart palpitations. We regularly have customers applauding us for the fact that our product works on Linux, Mac, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Win, IE, the list goes on. It even works on lots of platforms we don't officially "support" and never tested on. Getting that reach with typical Ajax+JavaScript simply couldn't have happened.
At the same time I understand the sentiment. I hope eventually we'll have time to build DHTML versions of Pandora in addition to Flash -- it's all matter of time and resources.
-Neil, Engineer @ Pandora
I'll make a guess that you're using Firefox with Flash 6. For some people that combo doesn't work so well. If you upgrade Flash, you'll get song/artist that updates when the songs change. (And it'll be a bit zippier. ;)
-Neil, Engineer @ Pandora