
Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) - Tomte
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=qtime.htm&mode=original
======
ungzd
Compare this to modern video players, especially in web, it's not that bad. No
disappearing buttons. No panels appearing from all 4 sides of screen on mouse
hover. This QuickTime thing does not appear from nowhere and start autoplaying
videos when you start some program or open document. It does not move to
screen corner when you press "close" button.

~~~
bduerst
This was also an age of people getting on computers for the first time. The
brushed aluminum feel, the drawers, static buttons, etc. were all to make it
feel like a physical media device since the target users were used to using
those to consume media in the 90's.

~~~
scoggs
The nostalgic web designer / graphic designer from those years in me is really
fond of and misses the old conventions of web interface and application
design.

I don't know if anyone / everyone remembers phong photoshop tutorials (oh my
god they are still there!
[http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/](http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/) )
but that type of interface design was my heart back then.

It was all about creating almost sci-fi like installation design. Wires,
vents, metal surfaces, rust, plastic, gel, glass, reflections, scanlines,
wireframing, grids and 3d grids, and other things like that. Think Starcraft's
HUD design and the Terran installation type maps that floated in space. (
[https://media-
curse.cursecdn.com/attachments/21/437/b34694f4...](https://media-
curse.cursecdn.com/attachments/21/437/b34694f4f8ff0888b507b0fbbeb8283d.jpg) <~
this is actually the perfect representation in my mind of what I wanted to
make in terms of the graphical interface in websites in the mid to late 90s
and probably early 2000s before everything became about "clean, flatter,
simple, "elegant") and I'm not so sure I like things that way.

In fact I think I'm going to make it an express feature that all of my future
side project's design portion will be dedicated to creating mid-to-
late-90's-like interface / graphical designs based on phong's tutorials and
other things I loved back then.

My favorite tutorial:

Metallic Tubes and Wires: \-------------------------
[http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/wire/](http://archive.phong.com/tutorials/wire/)

~~~
JohnBooty
Yeah, to my surprise there's a lot that I actually miss about that era.

I don't really miss the graphical excess of trying to make one's site look
like a Starcraft map, but even when that graphical excess existed it was sort
of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML. As opposed to today's
sites, which download and JIT megabytes of Javascript before they're ready to
respond to a single click, and have often invented their own bizarre UI
patterns.

~~~
scoggs
It's odd how right after that era the design stuff we're getting nostalgic
about was derided more often than not. Is that something you remember as well?
It's not that it was pointed out as being terrible and nasty like, let's say
Geocities or MySpace type pages, but I know there was a drastic shift and
unlike most trends it hasn't seemed to loop back on the internet of all places
where things seem to cycle back into popularity faster than something like
fashion? Maybe that's my personal perception but it feels at least somewhat
correct.

> it was sort of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML

Yes, I loved that too! It felt like you actually had a handle on everything
your website was doing and was comprised of. There wasn't anything involve
with it that you just installed and assumed would work. Each decision and
technology was something you knew inside and out and employed specifically.

Things these days are crazy, eh? Maybe it's a bigger combination of that part
of it plus the fact that it looked the way that I described that creates the
fuzzy feelings? Well, if I ever get around to doing what I said above I'll
have some sort of answer, haha.

~~~
JohnBooty
I do think that mid-2000s "web 2.0" era that came after the era of shiny pipes
and stuff.

The "web 2.0 era" was pretty good. There was a doubling down on semantic HTML,
sharing data via RSS, etc. The first cross browser JS frameworks began to pop
up which allowed everybody write JS once that would work mostly everywhere.

During that era there was definitely a lot of derision of that late "web 1.0"
era with the superduper photoshop-image-slice-heavy rendered pipes and stuff
UIs. At its worst a lot of it fundamentally broke basic web functionality like
bookmarking and such. The derision was probably justified, since it actually
sort of sucked when the whole web looked and worked like that.

HOWEVER, like you I am nostalgic for some of that excess! I like it better
than a lot of today's web!

------
DonHopkins
This is one of my favorite user interface design articles that I recommend
every chance I get, and it should be required reading in every design class.

Apple's long romance with skeuomorphism peaked with Bob Bishop's APPLE-VISION,
and went downhill from there.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-
cyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-cyU)

At the other end of the spectrum of video players with extremely terrible user
interfaces, there's VLC.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573499)

>[... detailed step by step instructions to demonstrate a terrible usability
failure that I wrote up in a bug report that was brushed off and ignored ...]

>This single facet of VLC's terrible UI deserves to be front and center in the
User Interface Hall of Shame [2] -- it's even worse than Apple's infamous
schizophrenically skeuomorphic QuickTime 4.0 player [3], from 1999! The latest
version of VLC in 2017 is still much worse than the shameful QuickTime player
was 18 years ago!

At least QuickTime 4.0 serves as a useful ruler by which we can measure the
terribleness of other video players.

~~~
rangibaby
You are free to change anything you like about VLC yourself. I don’t mind that
it’s interfacr is “broken” because it:

\- plays videos \- is free

~~~
bhandziuk
Imagine if everyone who had an issue with a program forked it and made their
own version.

~~~
rangibaby
I'm not exactly a leet hacker but have done that multiple times to scratch my
own itches.

~~~
DonHopkins
So where is your pull request to fix the bug I described? Why wasn't it
accepted?

------
Pulcinella
_The user is expected to make linear movements to operate a rotary control.
This is the reason that most properly-designed applications utilize linear
slide controls for similar functions._

I hate this UI paradigm. There are a bunch of graphic design apps on iOS that
do this (e.g. Affinity Designer) where you can change something like line
width. The icon shows a circle filling up as you change the property (it’s
rotary so it’s the circle “ring” filling up, not the disk). Except it expects
you to move your finger linearly to change the property, not in a rotary
fashion so it’s very confusing. Also you can move your finger linearly up and
down OR left and right. These movements are not exclusive of one another so
you can move your finger in a rotary pattern and then wonder why the line
width changes seemingly at random.

~~~
Synaesthesia
This is fairly common for music creation apps which have a lot of knobs, and
it makes sense because a knob doesn’t work so well with a mouse as dragging up
and down. It’s not immediately obvious though

~~~
qt4apologist
But wouldn't it make more sense to not have rotary knobs since they are so
confusing with a point and click interface?

~~~
reaperducer
Not if you work with both physical and virtual hardware.

Looking at a physical control board, you can see at a glance where a group of
knobs are positioned. Being able to then glance at a screen and get similar
information instantly is important for workflow.

------
Timucin
The site is loading the file called qtime.htm, so

[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=../../../../etc/p...](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=../../../../etc/passwd)

Oh the nostalgia... :)

~~~
spiderfarmer
Check the source to see why that doesn't work.
[http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=index.php&mode=or...](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=index.php&mode=original)

------
afandian
Nearly two decades later, have we made any progress? iTunes honestly confounds
me. And it seems like the Spotify UI is deliberately trying to prevent me from
finding the music I want to listen to.

~~~
mosselman
Apple Music is unusable, I don't get what the underlying concept is. Spotify,
at least compared to Apple Music, is pretty easy to use.

~~~
chrisseaton
> I don't get what the underlying concept is

It's an app for listening to music. You get a search box and a list of music
you've saved. What more concept is there to get?

~~~
Pulcinella
The “For you,” “Browse,” and “Radio” tabs in music.app are unnecessary. They
are just ads for apple music. I also don’t like how much the music app
advertises music I don’t own. I just want to listen to my music, not
accidentally tap an album I don’t own and be taken to a store page to purchase
it.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
In iTunes (which is what this thread is actually about), you can always
uncheck the box "Show Apple Music Features." There is a similar slider
control, "Show Apple Music," that can be turned off in the iOS Music Settings.

(Also, given that many millions of us actually _use Apple Music,_ describing
these tabs as "just ads" is incorrect. They're tabs that do things. I'd agree
that those tabs should be hidden by default if you're not an Apple Music
subscriber, though.)

------
mixmastamyk
I do remember despising "skinz" in the late 90s, for taking away my control of
the color scheme and all the other reasons this article describes.

While that went out of style, little did I know it was going to get worse in
other ways. Now the OS itself and recent browsers go out of their way to
prevent the use of dark themes by hard-coding colors everywhere.

We work in a darkened studio (color accurate) environment and are negatively
affected by your fucking enforced white backgrounds! It makes me even angrier
when I remember having better control in Windows 3.1 in the early 90s.

I use MATE now but the gnome3 and firefox-aping-chrome disease still shows
through the cracks. Very recent products have halfheartedly added a bit of
dark theme here and there but still don't seem to get that what we had twenty
years ago was just right.

~~~
flukus
I wish firefox would just make native clients instead of all this other
rubbish their trying to invent, that alone would make it a better browser.
These days it at least tries to use the native theme but they royally screwed
that app, you have either turn this off or turn off your dark desktop theme to
use 90% of web forms out there.

Bonus points if they could actually improve reader mode and enforce
contrasting colors.

------
avar
Is there some general overview of these "Blunder Years" of UX design? When
Steve Jobs came back to Apple there were numerous examples of this, e.g. the
volume control in QuickTime player being shown here, which was horribly
annoying to use since it used an on-screen design that only made sense for a
physical device.

They also had a note taking / desktop book program at some point that emulated
the look of a physical book to the detriment of its UI.

~~~
Sharlin
Steve Jobs, for whatever reason, really loved skeuomorphism, and in many cases
personally ordered those designs, disregarding the objections of designers
like Jony Ive.

~~~
reaperducer
_for whatever reason_

Because he was trying to make it easy for non-technical people to use a new
piece of technology.

It's the same reason that Microsoft included Minesweeper and Solitaire on
Windows 3.1 — to teach people how to double-click, and to click-and-drag.

Today, Silicon Valley just assumes that every single person in the world
already knows how computers work. Tell that to the people I work with who
spend an hour a week showing poor recent immigrants in their classes how to
install AA batteries in devices.

~~~
Sharlin
Unfortunately, more often than not physical metaphors in UI design only serve
to confuse. There's a reason nobody wanted to use the home metaphor of
Microsoft Bob.

------
Humdeee
As brutal as that UI was by today's standards, I would still consider it far
from the worst of UIs from the 90's. The behaviour of the controls were
objectively bad, but for the short time era were still rather impressive.
Media players seemed to always take the cake with terrible controls and skins
for presentation. I love 'em.

~~~
justin66
> As brutal as that UI was by today's standards

For the record, the horribleness of QT 4.0's UI was a topic of conversation
the moment it came out. The attention paid to UI quality by the industry has
ebbed and flowed at times, but there was never a standard under which QT 4.0
was ok.

~~~
DonHopkins
That's right!

It would have been bad for any company to come up with that design at the
time, but it was especially tragic coming from Apple, because it scuttled
their sterling and meticulously earned reputation of purposefully designing
user interfaces to be easily usable and learnable, and of going the distance
to adapt to quirky human behavior, physical and physiological limitations,
etc, and then documenting those designs and the rationales behind them, so
other people can understand and apply them, and then actually applying those
rules themselves. (But also unfortunately patenting some of those designs.)

QuickTime 4.0 marked the end of an era of great user interface design at
Apple.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345)

>The original 1987 version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines can be
checked out from the Internet Archive, and should be required reading for
serious user interface designers, the same way that serious art students
should contemplate the Mona Lisa, and serious music students should listen to
Mozart. Even though it's quite dated, it's a piece of classic historic
literature that explicitly explains the important details of the design and
the rationale behind the it, in a way that modern UI guidelines just gloss
over because so much is taken for granted and not under the control of the
intended audience (macOS app designers using off-the-shelf menus -vs- people
rolling their own menus in HTML, who do need to know about those issues):

[http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf](http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf)

For example:

pp. 87: Hierarchical Menus:
[https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png](https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png)

pp. 88: Figure 3-42: Dragging diagonally to a submenu item:
[https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png](https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png)

------
erlingw
I still remember using QuickTime 4.0 - revoltingly ugly interface, but at that
time Realplayer was even worse in usability.

On the bright side, this whole business of making "computer software look more
like real-world analogues" seems to be over once and for all.

~~~
lake99
> "computer software look more like real-world analogues"

Skeuomorphic design. That's the term for it.

~~~
ryandrake
Unfortunately it has been replaced by “flat” minimalism and other horrible
stuff straight out of art school. Application user interfaces are now designed
by graphic artists and not HCI engineers.

~~~
Sharlin
The worst of the flatness trend is fortunately already over.

~~~
java-man
have you seen windows 10? my eyes bled when first I installed this monstrosity
of blurry fonts and jarring whiteness...

~~~
ConceptJunkie
The saddest thing is that the "Classic" skin, which emulated the Windows 2000
look, and is light-years better than anything Microsoft has done since,
disappeared after Windows 7. Windows is now so "advanced" that it can't even
emulate how it looked 20 years ago.

I use WindowBlinds to sort of emulate the Windows 2000 look, but it still has
so many of those user-hostile flat UI features which inevitably reduce your
display to a mess of indistinguishable pale rectangles.

~~~
Avery3R
you can get it back kinda if you keep dwm from starting, but then you lose
some other things.

~~~
ryandrake
This is a long-standing problem for the whole software industry that is
largely unsolved: real separation between the user interface and other logic.
In order to stay on yesterday’s (better) UI, you need to stay on yesterday’s
software version, foregoing critical security and performance improvements, or
rely on nasty third party hacks to bring the old UI back to the new software.

I know a lot of people who deliberately do not update their software unless
forced to, because designers/developers cannot resist the urge to redo the UI
every year, pointlessly moving things around and changing everything.

~~~
CaptSpify
This, imho, is the biggest reason people don't update their software. They've
caught onto the fact that the term "updates" is misleading, and it would be
better call it an "anti-feature delivery mechanism".

This is why we need two separate channels for updates: One for security, and
the other for features.

~~~
java-man
Excellent idea!

But, unfortunately, quite unlikely: it assumes extra thought must go into
architecture and implementation. If you look around and see the current state
of software industry, the rapid increase of entropy in software systems, the
push of the market for cheaper, or completely free software, you'll find no
pressure ever to deliver an "anti-feature delivery mechanism".

Plus, making a perfect product effectively puts you out of business. But ship
a product that needs support, customization, training, consulting, periodic
updates, maintenance - and you a rich man!

------
cpcallen
To me, QT 4.0 was the beginning of the end of good UI design at Apple - when
the design stopped being done by HCI engineers and started being done by
graphic designers instead.

Unfortunately there are no other major players doing any better.

------
emilfihlman
Can we talk about the Chrome video and music player regression? It's a
horrible decrease in user experience while gaining only very, very, very
marginal "visual" wins.

Please bring back the old media player!

~~~
wlesieutre
YouTube goes out of its way to replace iOS's fullscreen media viewer with a
terrible one. Maybe they felt like they had to make it look like the desktop
UI or they needed the quality / settings buttons, but the scrubber is just
_bad_.

And they took away the +/\- 15 seconds buttons, which are much much better for
skipping around long videos than the scrubber is.

~~~
jimktrains2
Mystery meet navigation! On Android, I accidentally found tapping multiple
times quickly on the sides of a videos does this and the more you times you
tap the further back it goes.

Mystery meat navigation is probably the worst paradigm in all of us. Even
icons with stupid, but distinguishable icons is better.

~~~
bhandziuk
Discovering this is a big gamble because you don't accidentally double click
these regions because a single click could mean going forward of back a full
video in some playlist.

~~~
jimktrains2
Yeah, and they changed the behavior of the back button on Android to make it
impossible to go to the previous video!

------
jdofaz
I’m pretty sure this is when they introduced QuickTime pro, you had to pay $25
for innovative features such as viewing videos full screen.

I have a foggy memory of saving QuickTime Player 3.0 before installing 4.0 so
you could use the new codecs without the limitations of player 4.0.

------
vectorEQ
this doesn't really whip the llama's ass at all to be frank

~~~
throwaway77384
Anyone remember WinAmp radio and TV? Well, "TV"....we all knew what that was
used for mostly :D

~~~
anthk
German Techno Trance stations?

------
M_Bakhtiari
And to add insult to injury they made something as basic and ubiquitous as
copy and paste a pro feature that you had to pay extra for.

~~~
superhuzza
In what context would you use copy/paste in the QT player? Could you copy a
file and paste it onto the player to play?

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
A key feature of the original Macintosh operating system was an orthogonal
interface for copying, pasting, dragging and dropping arbitrary data, whether
plain or styled text or graphics, into (more or less) arbitrary locations,
which was far from obvious in consumer systems of the time.

And when QuickTime came about, video was no exception. You'd select a length
of video from the timeline, copy it and either paste it into a different
video, or into a presentation or other kind of document. It's ridiculous to
call the ability to use the OS the way it was intended a "pro feature" that
you should have to pay extra for.

------
maxmcd
The out of date link to the IBM RealThings guidelines is also a fascinating
relic of the past:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20041029001345/http://www-306.ib...](https://web.archive.org/web/20041029001345/http://www-306.ibm.com:80/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/publish/581)

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Ah, yes. The "worst of both worlds" design where you had to spend several
minutes poking at every little piece of chrome on the UI to figure out whether
or not it did something. And then about 5 years later came the equally idiotic
trend of making all desktop UIs look like web pages. Dark ages of UX, indeed.

------
jrnichols
The interface was definitely confusing and it was way too easy to click on the
wrong thing. And when you had a mouse that still had a mouseball that was
easily clogged, clicking on the wrong thing was extra annoying.

About the article itself: I miss the days when web design was that clean and
simple. Just the information, no fluff or ads.

------
laythea
I love these UI type reads. Very interesting.

Can I ask a quick poll.

Who favours the UI of modern software (all types) vs older software (all
types)?

I generally think we are going down hill.

So it OLDER for me!

~~~
Synaesthesia
Mac OS has improved with time, and so has Windows IMO. Windows XP looks pretty
horrible in its default skin.

~~~
mixmastamyk
But was clean and intuitive when switched to classic. On the whole modern
interfaces are not better and sometimes worse.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
Strange how it was so heavily influenced by IBM software of all things. "Start
your photocopiers" indeed. ;)

~~~
callalex
It’s funny that after all these years I still hear the phrase “Start your
photocopiers” in a French accent.

------
amyjess
I'd like to see some pictures of QuickTime 3.x for comparison.

------
kolderman
That thumbwheel...someone was on crack.

