Though I’d usually peg Apple for being a little more elegant, they’ve made the interesting decision in Quicktime Player 10 to put the controls over the video. I often use Quicktime at work for reviewing motion tests – short videos of UI that require detailed scrutiny, replays and scrubbing – so this feature has rendered the application virtually useless by constantly blocking the thing I’m looking at.

This may be a specific usage, but I doubt it’s rare and I’m not sure which user would *want* their video obscured when it clearly doesn’t have to be (c.f. Apple Quicktime 1-7). Maybe it seems more integrated or more like TV, though porting over the limitations of other platforms when not applicable is a strange kind of progress.

Also fascinating, and less frustrating, is their new 80s sci-fi icon (below left).

Luckily you can still get Quicktime 7 while anticipating the fate of this feature. However if you have Snow Leopard you have to install from the installer DVD.

I thought VLC media player would be better and has the added bonus of playing Windows Media files, but instead of controls it adds the file name on top of video. People just can’t leave video well enough alone.

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