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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, November 11, 2005

A response to "QuickTime Sucks, Seriously"

Musings from the Void has nothing good to say about QuickTime:

When you download it they try to force iTunes on you. Yes, there is (somewhere at the bottom of the page) a standalone player download. You and I both know that no 'novice user' is ever going to find that link; they are going to click the big shiny button 'get quicktime now'.

That Web link has nothing to do with QuickTime, the software that allegedly sucks. So this point is moot, and has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Yes, the way Apple shoves iTunes down your throat sucks, but that is immaterial.

The interface completely breaks the windows GUI paradigm.

It doesn't "break" the Windows UI paradigm. It just doesn't use Microsoft-supplied UI controls. It may shock you to realize that Microsoft itself is pushing non-standard UI controls in WinFX and Windows Vista. Furthermore, as the Microsoft Office team just admitted, Microsoft has been underestimating users for years: As it turns out, people can handle different UIs for different applications, especially if those UIs make sense for what the application is doing. You may not "like" the QuickTime UI, but that's an opinion. Apple's use of its own UI conventions is perfectly legit.

To view a movie full-screen, you need to pay for the 'pro' version ... [and] to save a movie (from the web) you need to pay for the 'pro' version

And ... what? You believe that Apple should give away software for free? The last time I checked, Apple was a publicly owned company with shareholders and employees and so on. One might argue that the price of QuickTime Pro is too high or whatever, but differentiating the Pro version from the freebie is Apple's right.

Quicktime INSISTS on installing itself in my taskbar.

I agree that this is unecessary. However, you can easily turn it off. I'd like to see Apple make this an opt-in feature at install.

Starting up quicktime (initially) takes quite a while even on a powerful system.

There's little doubt that the Windows version of QuickTime performs more poorly than the Mac version (and for the record, I've purchased the Pro versions of each, for both versions 6 and 7 now). Apple isn't exactly a world-class Windows development house, though I'd suppose they're getting better since 90 percent of all their iTunes/iPod users are on Windows.

In short, this guy's ranting about nothing. And look at me, defending Apple.

[ Posted at 1:14 PM | Permalink ]