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Pandora For Your Desktop: A Quick Review

June 3, 2008 |

Even if our Canadian friends can’t join into the party (thanks to the R, my favorite Internet radio station/music discovery engine Pandora is now available as an Adobe AIR desktop application.

The AIR app installs quickly and simply (just like all other AIR apps) and basically gives you the full Pandora online experience without the danger of losing your session because you closed the browser tab.

That, however, as Mark Hendrickson points out over at TechCrunch, also means that the desktop app doesn’t really make use of all the posibilities a desktop app could have. Instead, the app is basically a rather large window that shows the web app in a dedicated window – no more, no less. Pandora explains that they need this big window to be able to serve up ads to pay the bills – makes sense and while I don’t like it from an aesthetic perspective, I appreciate that they are not just adding users for the sake of it and are actually thinking about how to create a sustainable service.

Because Pandora is a great service, I am willing to forgive it its shortcomings.

Just two notes: 1) a lot of Mac users are complaining about the app being very CPU intensive – something I don’t see in the Windows version and 2) the app did crash on me once while I was testing it out – but it’s beta software, so I guess that’s to be expected.

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