Command Shift Q

There’s no doubt Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a far more stable Operating System than later versions of vanilla Leopard. But amid some of the “very Apple” subtle tweaks and refinements, I think there’s also legitimate concern that Apple may have stripped away, in the pursuit of stability, some of the magic dust which separated it from the competition.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, I’m going to look at how many babies Apple have thrown away with the bathwater and look at a worrying trend in which we ordinary users are being increasingly ignored and cut out of the infinite loop, when it comes to feedback on Apple’s products.

Quicktime X
The default media player in OS X has needed an overhaul for some time. But overhaul and cripple are two very different things.

For example, previous versions of Quicktime enabled a number of handy, quick editing functions. Such as the ability to cut and paste sections of a video and audio into a blank file and export the result out in a variety of formats.

In Snow Leopard, however, any kind of editing above and beyond very basic end to end trimming must be done in iMovie, which means having to import an entire clip simply to normalise audio levels, or join two shorter videos together into one clip, or any number of basic clean-up tweaks which could be previously done in Quicktime Player alone.

Also gone is the ability to alter the aspect ratio of a clip which has been encoded incorrectly on the fly. For example, certain types of video playback, like SECAM (used in France) and NTSC (used in the USA), when converted to PAL (used in the UK) can sometimes inherit a 14:9 aspect ratio akin to watching Standard Definition 4:3 content on a 16:9 widescreen display. Quicktime used to have a number of controls which would compensate for this kind of stretching and squeezing, which have now been removed entirely.

That, in addition to this, there doesn’t appear to be any way of re-enabling these functions in iMovie, it’s hard to see why Apple might have done this, especially given the ubiquity of prosumer digital video and stills cameras which are designed around the Quicktime video format, such as the Canon G series of compacts and the Panasonic Lumix range of DSLRs.

Stealth downgrading of this kind, where users are expected to turn a blind eye to the removal of functionality because the whole thing is dressed up in a fancy new interface, is exactly the kind of own goal Apple has rightly been criticised for scoring the past and it not one likely to go down well with users who only occasionally call upon these functions, when they need to use them the most only to find they are no longer available.

It is undoubtably easer than ever before to open a video file, taken from a digital device, trim out unwanted sections and upload it to YouTube or export it into a variety of other playback formats. Quicktime X supports exporting direct to MobileMe and iTunes—the latter making it even easier than it already was to get content from the desktop and on to your iPod.

But anyone who already used Quicktime for such things as this, as opposed to some piece of freeware, is unlikely to be very happy when they find they can no longer do so depite having “upgraded” to the latest version—which begs the question why the old version of Quicktime needed changing at all, especially when so many useful aspects of it have been thrown away, rather than simply moved somewhere else, like into iMovie or iPhoto.