Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999)
hallofshame.gp.co.at
hallofshame.gp.co.at
I don't know if anyone / everyone remembers phong photoshop tutorials (oh my god they are still there! 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... <~ 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/
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.
> 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.
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!
If you stuck the modern quick time interface in 90s, I imagine the disappearing buttons and positional play interface daunting. We've evolved as our literacy has evolved.
Absolutely terrible design.
In short, Gmail 2018 does a fraction of what Outlook '98 did two decades ago, and does it while pissing away processing power, memory, and screen space. This sucks. I want off this ride.
(While I'm ranting: what's up with Dropbox these days? I've been looking for an app to manage a library of PDFs and notes alongside. I decided to try Dropbox & Dropbox paper. The web app burns up 20% CPU just sitting there displaying a PDF. It can't render fast enough to keep with scrolling. I don't remember PDFs being onerous back in the late 1990s, but web apps seem to universally struggle with them even on modern hardware. After trying a bunch of other crap-tacular web apps, I stumbled upon Citavi, a traditional Windows .NET app. I was so happy I almost cried. It displays PDFs! It sits at 0% CPU usage when idle! It has a menu and toolbars, and you can dock and undock the content area to fit everything on screen! It's a wholly unremarkable app that's remarkable only because software has gotten so incredibly awful in the last decade.)
I've been using it since the new UI update, which seems to have awful scrolling performance on safari.
Unfortunately Elsevier own it nowadays, but it's very functional. Also, I haven't used Citavi, so I can't offer you a comparison.
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
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
>[... 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.
what's worse, i don't think there is a reasonable solution for this problem. popularity of free software is just too alluring to the users, and asking for monetary compensation instantly reduces the user base.
example: linux and openssl. large corporations benefit from running open source software. do they compensate the authors?
- Full-screen VLC fast-forward skips forward in the video by a few seconds.
- Windowed VLC fast-forward skips the entire video.
- plays videos - is free
Because I'm a user interface programmer who could actually do that work, I also have a lot of other pressing things to do with my time, and wouldn't want to waste it if there was no chance of the developers accepting my changes or even acknowledging that there was a problem.
If they brush off my bug report, I thought, then they probably won't accept my changes.
But that's exactly what they did, which proved to me it wasn't worth my time.
The developers also ignored and argued against many other valid bug reports and complaints on the discussion board. Their attitude came through quite clearly and consistently, and my experience wasn't unusual.
If you disagree that it's not worth the time, then by all means you should get started downloading the source code, reading it to understand how it works, submitting bug reports on any problems you find, getting up to speed so you're qualified to make changes in the proper way that the developers will accept, fix the bug I described, test it on all platforms, and submit a pull request.
Funny thing is, in the anime/tokusatsu fansubbing community, VLC has a really, really bad reputation because it does everything just a little bit wrong. Many of the more respectable fansubbing groups have big warnings in their FAQs saying "don't use VLC", typically in bold and all caps (the usual recommendation is to use CCCP on Windows and mpv on Linux and Mac). Their support for chapters in MKV containers has been hideously broken for a long time, and they have an NIH syndrome where they implement their own versions of things that are provided by open-source libraries that everyone else uses, which causes all kinds of slight incompatibilities.
I think modern UI is becoming over simplistic - it's no longer obvious what is meant to be interacted with [2]. Humans usually have a good grasp of depth and things pretending to have depth.
I imagine OSX will eventually go the way of iOS and Android with a flat UI, where it's not obvious at all how you're supposed to interact with it. Apple products have been getting harder to use for a long time, with features such as the insane four/five finger scroll on an iPad to change apps, close windows, etc [3].
And don't even get me started with the Apple Newton [4].
[1] https://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/30000/30671/winamp...
[2] https://www.soft32.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/WIndo...
[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/2975857/ios/6-only-for-ipad...
https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV
That's right: the mouse target is the outlined region whose width (and thus usability) diminishes to zero towards one end. It's the most Fitts' Law Hostile user interface I've ever seen, AND it rotates sideways and upside down with the video, AND the mouse tracking doesn't work at all in 3 out of 4 rotations (or reflection), only when it's non-rotated and non-reflected: they didn't bother to transform the mouse event coordinates, just the video-resolution user interface drawing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
Don't even get me started about "interlaying" the user interface INTO the video, so it looks jaggy with unreadable text, instead of "overlaying" the user interface at full screen resolution. Just look at those blocky letters "VLC ZOOM HIDE", and the ferocious jaggies on the diminishing zoom slider curve!
It's not even worth fixing any of those particular bugs in the zoom interface, because the entire concept of "interlaying" the user interface into the video is fatally flawed.
All that code needs to be printed out and burned, and VLC's entire user interface needs to be completely rearchitected from scratch by designers who know and respect Fitts' Law, so it works consistently across all platforms at all resolutions and rotations (and doesn't suck, while they're at it).
But that's not what the VLC developers want to acknowledge or work on. They're more interested in supporting the latest fashionable Anime format.
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html
>FOR ANIME FANS
>New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.
But nothing for us "usability fans".
I would also hazard a guess the mobile user is larger than the anime user base, and they're just as concerned with usability as the desktop users.
Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?
Is it just you who feels this way, or can you point me towards some evidence of that, please? Because if you read the VLC bug reports and discussion group, and even this thread, you can see that there are a lot of people who agree with me that VLC needs to focus more on usability. Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?
Either the Anime audience is better at filing bugs and chasing the up, or the developers favoured those tasks for some reason. Perhaps the UI guy is really slow or just missing entirely.
>Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?
There aren't any. It's clearly not a trade-off on developer time. For an open source project, people work on what interests them the most.
Specifically in regards to "anime fetish" - who actually cares? What difference does it make if it is an Anime crowd, people who like watching 8k raw footage, people who want to watch 3D films or whatever. What does the specific reason for a video format being worked on bring to the table, other than the fact you clearly don't like it?
And it's not a matter of anime fans being better at filing bugs. As I said, I filed some very detailed bugs, with step-by-step instructions to prove there was a problem, and they were flippantly dismissed and ignored.
At least Apple had the decency to acknowledge the universally held opinion that the QuickTime 4.0 player SUCKED, and they fixed.
Winamp on the other hand, I can't name a single application that does what it does better today. Also, barely any media player today looks native either.
I'm talking UI, not functionality. Functionality wise - I am just as in love with the old WinAmp. And regarding UI, it was awesome that people could re-skin it!
>Also, barely any media player today looks native either.
Of course, but some do a better job than others I think. I think VLC appears more native anyway (it uses native menus and dialogue for menus).
VLC is quite bad in comparison I think, but it is hard to compare the two.
Do you actually believe it's a good idea, or that there is any possible justification, for VLC to NOT use a native user interface, and instead draw the user interface INTO the video at video resolution, and rotating it with the video, but not rotating the mouse events (so it is absolutely UNUSABLE under rotation or reflection, and extremely hard to use even unrotated because the re-invented ugly non-standard sliders in a stupid way that flaunts Fitts' Law for no good reason), and using giant jaggy pixels and a terrible blocky font and short upper case labels so it's not too enormous for low resolution vidoes, is better than drawing a native user interface at full screen resolution with a decent full resolution anti-aliased font in the overlay that is actually usable at any video resolution, scale, rotation or reflection?
Please stare into these screen snapshots for a few minutes and reflect on what I said, and then go run the latest version of VLC, and prove to yourself that it's still just as bad as I described before replying, because it is.
https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV
"VLC ZOOM HIDE" indeed. Look closely at the "V": It's five pixels wide, and it's so jaggy it looks like a step ladder with only 3 steps.
VLC has a lot of features that often are rather tangential to a media player and it can sometimes act as a frontend for ffmpeg (especially the stream/convert tools). The fact that basic features, power user features and plain gimmicky crap (like the puzzle mode) are lumped in all together in one application without organization, rhyme, reason, or separation almost automatically makes for atrocious UI. With some features being added by someone who felt the need for it or needed an exercise in programming doesn't help. VLC is a kitchen sink of vaguely media-related stuff and the UI does little to hide this.
One point where I'm split on is single-key hotkeys. For years it was trivial to crash VLC simply by starting to type (something that happened to me regularly when I forgot that my IM application didn't have the focus, but rather VLC). If it didn't crash, you now had the video horizontally mirrored, in greyscale, with subtitles in Ancient Sumerian and video, audio, and subtitles were all a second out of sync to each other. Good luck figuring out how to revert that. Having hotkeys only be F keys and Ctrl+something at least has the benefit that you can't mess up things accidentally, at the expense of needing chords to interact with the application via keyboard (I'd say Windows Media Player's Ctrl+P for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on which button had the focus was just as bad, but at least you couldn't crash it by typing into the wrong window by accident. As is YouTube for requiring K for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on where the focus is ...).
I never understood why that became a dirty word in user interface design.
There's nothing wrong with wanting a calendar to look like a calendar. If someone comes up with a different paradigm that is better, then by all means do it, and let people decide if it's good.
But ever since skeuomorphism became an anti-buzz word, interfaces have been designed to be different just to be different, not to be better.
> Unfortunately, the apologists fail to recognize that there are two likely consequences of this approach: (1) the user is unable to transfer his or her existing knowledge of computer interaction, and (2) the software becomes needlessly subject to the limitations of the physical device.
I remember the bad old days where the Mac calendar would only let you flip between pages, because that's how real calendars worked. All your contacts were grouped by first letter, because Rolodex. It was a death by a million cuts where nothing worked as well as it could have because it had to exactly emulate the crummy real world thing it looked like. No thanks - that's the aspect of skeuomorphism that gave it such a horrible reputation.
If you want to make my calendar look like it has leather trim, fine. So be it. Just don't make it act like an old-fashioned desk calendar instead of the special purpose database it really is.
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.
I feel like a rotary should “adjust” a value up or down rather than representing absolute values.
It is about just as imprecise.
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.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=../../../../etc/p...
Oh the nostalgia... :)
I honestly don't know how the app could be made any simpler.
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?
(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.)
They’ve been slowly stripping things out of iTunes into their own applications for years, and no recent Apple services use the iTunes branding (Apple Music, for example). I give it a couple of years before it’s replaced and left in the “Other” folder in /Applications
Ugh, just give me back the iOS 5 music app.
Very (intentionally) bare-bones by default but it can be configured/extended to be amazing.
It can handle thousands songs in a playlist and supports a lot of audio formats, perhaps the most of audio players out there. You even have queue if you wish.
It's sad because I know there are far better interfaces, but the reality of streaming means your media is locked behind an inferior product.
I found a similar issue watching NHL games on nhl.tv and eventually found a script online to download the raw files and build an mkv out of them - no more buffering, can work around region restrictions with a vpn, and play it anywhere I want (like offline on a plane)... but it just seems so unnecessary to have to go through all that.
You're right about the downside of streaming. I used to use Amazon until they killed their Cloud Music capability earlier this year, and I switched over to Google. Both services provide a lot of value, but in both cases my number 1 request would be to somehow allow third-party apps to access the cloud because the built-in apps are pretty awful.
Over on Android Google play can't stream reliably unless 5 bars of signal, but can't even give any buffer settings. In the real world it's simply shit and unusable unless you like a random length silence at least every 5 mins. Other apps figured out buffering a decade ago.
I don't think it got better past Winamp.
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.
Bonus points if they could actually improve reader mode and enforce contrasting colors.
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.
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.
http://orig13.deviantart.net/f597/f/2009/164/a/b/headspace_s...
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.
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
>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
For example:
pp. 87: Hierarchical Menus: https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png
pp. 88: Figure 3-42: Dragging diagonally to a submenu item: https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png
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.
Skeuomorphic design. That's the term for it.
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.
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.
This is why we need two separate channels for updates: One for security, and the other for features.
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!
Unfortunately there are no other major players doing any better.
Please bring back the old media player!
Isn't that an accurate summary of Google design in the past ~5 years? What revoltong incompetence.
Perfect position to cover subtitles of the full-screen movie you're watching. On more than one occasion, I've had to rewind the video to catch a critical subtitled word because I made the mistake of making a minor volume adjustment at the wrong time.
You can turn off the block entirely from the terminal, but then you lose the indication of where you are in the volume continuum.
And they took away the +/- 15 seconds buttons, which are much much better for skipping around long videos than the scrubber is.
Mystery meat navigation is probably the worst paradigm in all of us. Even icons with stupid, but distinguishable icons is better.
Although the mobile version is unconscionably awful, I almost always have to guess at what the controls do and avoid opening the app.
But if you:
1) go to shitty-fullscreen
2) hit picture-in-picture
3) go back to fullscreen
4) close fullscreen back to normal view
5) pinch-outward to zoom
Dear Googlers reading this: you may be tempted to go out of your way to fuck it up further and remove this workaround. Pretty please don't? Thanks.
I think the reason they do this is because the standard media player allows for picture in picture and background playback.
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.
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.
About the article itself: I miss the days when web design was that clean and simple. Just the information, no fluff or ads.
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!
Can you give more details on what you consider modern design and what you consider older design?
For me the user interface has been dumbed down in almost all modern software. Microsoft, apple etc. They are all at it!
The UI of older software assumes a more knowledgeable user, which, being a more knowledgeable user, drives my preference.
I liked the win95/2000 era of UI.
Major OSes seem to be worse at having consistent interfaces. Trying to make desktop interfaces work like the constrained screens of phones and tablet by hiding scrollbars, etc. is a step back. Useful animations are a step forward, but useless and slow animations are a step back.
However, web interfaces have gotten better since the death of Flash. They're not perfect, or maybe even good, but they're much better than previously.
So it's a mixed bag. I prefer modern web design to that of the past, but prefer older OS design to the present mostly.
I strongly prefer the aesthetic of Win9x, Mac OS 8/9, and NeXTSTEP to what's popular today.
In fact, I use QtCurve on my desktop to get pretty close to that aesthetic for any KDE/Qt programs I use.