[schwei]

Post your interface comments here.

A coupla quick comments:

---While my install went OK, looks like the
installer can't recover from a dropped
connection; user has to start over.

---As previously noted, you can't collapse
a QTPlayer um, er,player. The resize tab
is less than intuitive. Hopefully on a
G4 the player'll show more than just its
ghost outline when user resizes!

---bass & treble controls don't affect MIDI
playback at all, so maybe they should
be greyed out when MIDI is present??

---Anybody notice that there's no new
Balloon help? see how much of the player
surface is considered part of the title
bar!

---this product has a way to go, hope
Steve reads this, but it's a great start.
Expect 5,000,000 more trailer DLs!!



------------------
Mac evangelist since 1986

[asagoo]

- A main thing I noticed was the bad interface "performance" on a 200MHz PPC603. Redrawing is kind of slow and the drawers don't move very smoothly. I suppose it takes a G3 to really enjoy the interface.
- Also, I thought it would support live dragging, as in Final Cut Pro.
- I think a single click on the favourites drawer should expand it, rather than a double-click.
- The player really is kind of large.
- However, it looks just beautiful!

* What happened to Navigation Services? Do any Apple products (not counting the Finder) support this Apple technology? The new QT Player does not.

* Why is the interface on the Player so slow on my 8500/150? The drawers just crawl open.

* Streaming video looks terrible on my LAN-connected G3/300. What gives?

* It'd be nice if we could save the "favorites drawers" as sets.

* The progress bar in the Player is soooo ugly. QT movies opened in other applications have the old-style bar (although it too has been jazzed up a bit). The ugly little floating-dingbat progress bar has to go away.

* MP3s keep skipping.

* No balloon help in the Player?

* Don't get me wrong, I like the new interface. But it certainly needs fixing.

hi

Liking BBC's stuff, I took a look at the live streaming, embedded movie on the Apple Site.

Figuring that I could use the QTPlayer to view the stream later, I *tried to drag the movie on web page to the players drawer* ... no way ! To me, this would have been a very intuitive way of creating a favorite.

So I drag it to the desktop, then drag the resulting icon into the drawer. This works, but results in a generic QT icon in the drawer. Sigh.

What is the the thumbnail based on ? Poster frame ? Can I change it later ?

As a provider of a stream, could I provide a picture (like BBC logo) to act as the thumbnail, incorporated in the movie ?

jOn

[AAPl Shareholder]

Guys ...don't complain about quicktime 4's speed. Remember Apple is first and formost a hardware company. They would love for you to buy a new g3 in order to use quicktime 4 to the fullest. Software just sells hardware.

Is there any use for the seperate pause button? It also should appear pushed when paused, although I think it should be gotten rid of, and just change the play button to a pause button.

Also, why can't the player window be windowshaded?

And file names really are needed in the "faveorites" (bah) tray. Balloon style, or just a way to view the tray as a list (icon on left, name on right)

Schwei:

The full-window drag will most likely come with Mac OS X (or maybe a bit eariler). A G3 has more than enough power to do opaque window drags -- rather than just outlines -- as Mac OS X Server does this out of the box. In fact, it also does live window resizing.

It's just that the OS doesn't have built-in support for this. I hear Final Cut Pro has this feature, though.


asagoo:

Yes, I believe faster machines are the ones that are able to redraw the complex gradients of the interface quickly while still decompressing and playing back high-quality movies.


chibbert:

You need to select a connection speed (in QuickTime Settings control panel) that is appropriate for your LAN's connection to the internet. For example, if you have 200 people on a fractional T1 (.5MB/sec), you might better off with selecting "112k Dual ISDN".

Additionally, codecs and protocols can only do some much. When it comes down to it, QuickTime and RealPlayer will churn out very similar quality. Video just requires a lot of bandwidth.


I agree with all the other comments.

- Scott


------------------
Scott Stevenson
Contributing Editor,
MacN

[asagoo]

- The close box of a player window should disappear while the window is in the background (at least until MacOS X).
- I noticed that while resizing the window or having menus open, the sound continues to play. I thought these actions block nearly everything else on the mac. Was this the case with QT3?
- By the way, MacAmp has built-in live dragging, and it works smoothly.

Here's my thoughts:

like...

�I like the brushed silver look of the player and the plug in.
�I like the concept of the draw
�I like the font the title is in
�I like the look of the buttons
�I actually LIKE the progress bar thingy.


don't like...

�Where's my windowshade widget!!!
�Where's my growbox widget!!!
�The resize thing doesn't work as expected. I want to resize the window, NOT the movie.
�I can't tell if the window is in the background. Visually show that controlls are disabled.


Need's work, but it IS promising

[47Ronin]

The interface is cool except for the retro flat-style progress bar. The favorites drawer is the worst thing.. it's slow to expand/contract (jerkily instead of smooth). You can't really tell what you're pointing at in the slots, you just see an icon-- no description, no URL pop-up-- nothing! It only makes sense when you select an item from the menu. The window size is odd when you're looking at a small video.. so much dead space around it.

------------------
Glenn
47 Ronin Multimedia
www.47ronin.com

[schwei]

Re Scott's of 4/20, specifically window dragging, I use Landweber's PowerWindows
and Montalcini's DragAnyWindow and they
coexist nicely on my 300MHz 603e (starMax),
so I can **really** open up a huge Faves
Drawer with the Player.

Seems very cumbersome though to open up
a new player (in b21) for each "christening" of a QT file into the
v4 faves list (looks like there's only
one global one right now). Noticed that
option-open removes the phraseology "in
new player" but creates one anyway.


------------------
Mac evangelist since 1986

It's interesting that there is no jerkiness using QT4 on the machine I use here at Hell uh, Dell. It's a 233mhz Pentium II Optiplex with 64MB ram and when pulling the drawer it is very smooth. There is the occasional stutter on MP3s when saving a file or opening a program. On my G3233 7100 at home the drawer is very jerky. They need to work on this.

kudos-
For the interface design. I also like the dragging of the complete picture from the movie window.

Open Close Dialog Boxes-
On the Mac - I hope Apple does use Navigation Services. For the PC I hope apple fixes the open/close dialog boxes to display the last used directory for default. It's kind of a pain.

Progress Bar-
Fine, but not as cool as the rest of the interface.

WhatIf-
Use something similar to NS Communicator in the player to allow expandable fields for things like direct entry of URI's. I'm lazy and want to save the menu click to enter the URI. Cooler still would be integration with Sherlock (on Mac) to provide a What's Related type of feature or open a small browser search window (sized like the annoying pop up windows on sites like Excite and Netscape) for PCs.

plugins-
I can see an aftermarket for custom UI stuff like perhaps the drawer could open up to a radio console with 'radio' preset buttons and preset level controls like disco, rap, etc...

-interface is VERY slow, even on G3 266.
-desktop pictures aren't working propperly - they look like 256-colour pics.
-poor playing performance
-too-big windows

[zoeph]

What weird things I am reading on this and other threads about the resizing of the new QuickTime player windows. When did any of you complain when using QT3, or for that matter, older versions? Guess I missed it. People are shelling out good money for TV sets with HDTV ratios enabled, and for good reason. What good is it to have your StarWars trailer resized to, say, 100 wide x 600 high? I like my movies to be in their original aspect ratio. This feature is not counter intuitive, it's contextsensitive interface design, which is very good.

It's about the same as using stupid non 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions like 1280x1024 (who ever invented _that_), which will leave two black stripes at both sides of the screen if you want your circles to look like circles instead of squashed-out melons.

If you don't like this feature, you can always set the size _and_ the aspect ratio differently from the size option in the info panel. For which you of course need the Pro version, but since the people complaining are all obviously so gung-ho about new software you probably bought Mac OS 8.5 (Pro license included). If 8.5 came installed on your new PowerMac, well damn, buy Pro now and stop complaining. Isn't it great Apple lets us upgrade to Pro 4 for free?

[asagoo]

It would be nice if the player buttons would react on clicks while in the background, so that you don't have to click once to activate the window, and again to press the button.
The AppleCD Audio application works like this, and also all Finder windows.

About that resizing thing:
You can resize a window non-proportionally if you press shift while resizing.

I believe that once 8.6 comes out your preformance qualms will be over, at least that is what my experience is saying.. I think they might have tried to make the player optimized for the 8.6 kernal.. At least that is how it seems to me.. This is from a person running 8.6b9. My streaming is messed up because I am on an appletalk network, but the interface works beutifully. Still same qualms about the interface not having windowshade or drag and drop. You cannot play a movie by just dragging it on the player, you have to put it in the favorites first.. Very annoying...

[zoeph]

Guess I screamed a bit to loud just now.
I'm probably spoiled by using a 20 inch screen at 1360x1024 res. And, most of the time when I want to resize a movie I just hit one of the shortcuts, cmd-0, cmd-2, etcetera.
The window remains bulky though, and indeed behaves a bit strangely when resizing small movies. I must say there's a certain elegance in it, although it's not very consistent.

To be sure, in other threads I there really are some reactions from people complaining about the aspect ratio thing. The ones in this thread clearly are pointing at something else. Thanks to Blake Seely for putting things in the right perspective. Anyway, I had my fun spilling my gut on a chilly Amsterdam afternoon, just like so many others when Apple brings out something new.