Damn you, Apple. Damn you and your sad attempts at Windows software development. I understand if a Safari beta isn’t great when it comes to usability, but, for a company that spends so much time on its HIG—and rightly so—you sure as hell did a terrible job with the UI for QuickTime, and I can only assume iTunes is the same, because I sure as hell don’t want that piece of crap media player on my machine.
Yes, the menus look awful. Yes, if your system language is different from the one you chose in Regional and Language Options, only half the application is localized. And, yes, the fonts look blurred, because ClearType is unbeaten for everything non-DTP, period.
But probably the worst feature in both QuickTime Player and Safari for Windows is Apple’s horrid implementation of my beloved Maximize feature.
Before all you Mac fanboys start the whole “Maximizing is for chumps” tirade, I’ll give you my version.
I maximize the majority of my windows. I even have my mouse’s only extra button mapped to maximizing or restoring the active window. It makes perfect sense and it doesn’t mean I am not multitasking. I can only look at one thing at a time, even though I am doing several things at once. This really is a nuance Cupertino needs to wrap its head around. Of course, they like to waste screen real estate to justify having dual 30″.
That being said, whether or not you like maximizing is not even the point. On Windows, it’s part of the experience and therefore Apple should start implementing it properly like everybody else. And wanting to stick to your own theme is not an excuse, because they aren’t the only people doing it.
What’s wrong with their implementation then? At least three things.
One. If I hit the Maximize button in QuickTime Player, it doesn’t maximize. The window just stretches and respects the video’s aspect ratio. That’s not what I asked for.
Two. Every decent visual style or theme, be it on Windows, KDE or whatever, has a maximized window’s control buttons in an easily reachable corner—on Windows, it’s the top right, evidently. But on a Mac, thanks to fucking Finder, Exposé and whatnot, all the corners are taken, so you need to navigate precisely to the god-awful colored balls. On Windows, if you want to close the active window, provided that it is maximized, you just throw your mouse to the top right corner blindly and click. I don’t know about you, but I find myself doing that a lot.
Now, you’d think Apple would understand the benefit of this in Windows software and support it in theirs. Well, surprise, surprise: they do not. And they’re not even consistent about it.
Maximized or not, the top right corner of a QuickTime Player window is dead, so you need to navigate to the X before you can close it. Yes, this is annoying to me—but not as annoying as Safari’s implementation.
On Safari, not only does the click not affect Safari itself, but thanks to the utterly obsolete rounded corners, you actually close the window behind it, which obviously does respect Windows’s tradition. Simply unacceptable.
Three. Like I said, I have a Maximize button on my mouse. That button behaves exactly like the one in the active window’s titlebar, except in Apple’s applications, because, well, they’re Apple.
You see, Apple’s applications blatantly ignore the window manager and just provide their own buttons. Just right-click on the taskbar button of QuickTime Player or Safari. The developers still bothered to support minimizing QuickTime Player from its context menu, but in Safari’s, every option is disabled, even though you can still sort of get them to work if you’re willing to use your mouse and click on Apple’s poor excuse for titlebar buttons.
And again, obviously, the behavior is different in QuickTime Player than it is in Safari. Because, even though the context menu option to maximize the window is disabled, my mouse’s button still activates the feature. Surprisingly, in Safari, it works as expected—no, really! In QuickTime Player, however, it makes the window fill the whole screen, which includes covering the taskbar. I guess I should at least be happy it ignores the video’s aspect ratio.
Honestly, amateurs. I can’t believe they’re getting away with this. And I can’t believe they keep acting so smug while doing so. If using Apple software on Windows is supposed to convince people of the greatness of OS X, then by all means, Apple, keep it up.
