A lot of the recent work on Streams hasn't been the flashy kind.
There haven't been a bunch of new buttons appearing in the desktop app or some giant feature you can immediately show off in a screenshot. Instead, I've been working on the infrastructure underneath Streams — the stuff that has to exist if this is going to become a real product instead of just a really useful program sitting on my computer.
And we're getting close to a pretty huge milestone:
The Cedar Harbor backend is starting to feel complete.
Over the last several development phases, the platform behind Streams has grown to handle real account authentication, licensing, device activations, trials, organizations, multi-factor authentication, recovery codes, license transfers, account lifecycle management, Paddle commerce integration, transactional email, and organization/shared-workstation licensing.
More recently, that backend has started getting a real customer-facing interface.
The Cedar Harbor Account Portal now supports passwordless login, personal license information, device management, and account security.
MFA enrollment and authenticator verification are working end-to-end, including recovery codes and fresh-authentication requirements for sensitive actions.
Tonight I finished testing that flow manually as an actual user instead of simply trusting the automated test suite. We found a few small UI validation bugs along the way, fixed them, added regression coverage, and finished with 43 passing Account Portal tests.
Development has now moved into organization and team management — members, invitations, roles, permissions, shared workstations, device limits, and organization-managed Streams access.
That part matters because I don't want organization licensing to become the usual:
Pay us for every human being who might touch a computer.
The idea behind Streams is much simpler:
License the workstation, not every employee.
There's still work left before I can call the backend finished.
The customer portal needs its remaining purchasing and account-management pieces, followed by the internal Cedar Harbor administration tools and final production deployment and security work.
But the mountain of invisible infrastructure is finally getting smaller.
Once that backend milestone is reached, development swings heavily back toward Streams itself:
- Connecting the desktop application to the licensing platform
- Finishing advanced workflow logic
- Adding Python support
- Completing the full UX and regression pass
- Packaging the installer and updater
- Getting Streams into real beta testing
That's the part I'm especially looking forward to.
The backend has taken a lot of work, but building it properly now means Streams won't have to rely on a pile of shortcuts later.
More importantly, it gives Cedar Harbor Studios a foundation that can support whatever comes after Streams.
One system. Multiple products. Built once, built right.
Back to work.