Clients and Services

Recently several blog-posts talk about services in relation to clients. The last post blogs about a speech that Tim O’Reilly gave at the MacOS-X conference. O’Reilly thinks he sees the future in Apple’s iTunes program (client). He especially likes the sharing possibilities. But there is still a log way to go. I guess that the red line through this are network connected applications (all your local apps can become a service) and embedded services such as CDDB and iTunes Music Store.

Pito talks in one of its blogs about the interface of web-based apps. He notes that web-based apps can be powerful and that URL’s are very important. But in iTunes I do not see any URL’s for the services. I think that is much easier for the user. I think I prefer the way Apple goes: Applications will always be much richer than browser-based applications, especially if the application start to work together. And Internet services will start to be hidden in the apps.

Om Malik discusses Micro-clients such as iTunes as the future: XML-powered micro-apps. This looks like a similar discussion.