I was watching an instructional movie tonight in QuickTime X, and needed to pause it to look at what was going on.
This is what QuickTime gave me. Note the that “now you see me, now you don’t” window bar is actually obscuring the menu bar of the application shown on the screen, which is the part of the movie I was trying to look at more closely:
The new UI of Quicktime lacks any “chrome”. It’s a slick look… if all you’re doing it watching a movie. However, if you want to pause a movie, well it’s pretty dang ugly. You can forget getting a screenshot of whatever you’re watching, because that’s when the faux-chrome appears, and it never goes away.
Compare that to how this same image looks in QuickTime 7:
Yes, my screenshot shows the “chrome” but I could crop that out fairly easily if I wanted to, but more importantly, in QuickTime 7 I can actually see what I wanted to see which was which menu item was being used.
Despite the new QuickTime’s designation as “X” (or “10″ like “Mac OS X”) it’s really a 1.0. It’s a fairly typical Apple move, throw away the old way completely and force people to use the new way, much like with iMovie. As with iMovie, Apple has kept QuickTime 7 around as an optional install, and it is still downloadable from Apple’s website.
This 1.0 is rough around the edges, and so minimal that it’s fairly painful, especially if you were used to QuickTime Pro. Yes, the chrome-less looks nice (actually it looks strange, but it’s an “ok” kind of strange), but it isn’t always practical.
I wondered if there was a preference to make the window bar “normal”—which was when I realized that there are no preferences for QuickTime X at all…
Oh, Apple…
This particular problem is “fixable”… simply have the “faux” window bar and controls fade after a few seconds, as QuickTime 7 did in full screen mode. Move the mouse over the window, and it reappears. I suspect Apple will do something like that in a later version of QuickTime, but perhaps they were concerned that people would not know where the controls were at all if they didn’t keep them on-screen for QuickTime X “1.0″.
That said, I seem to recall from my brief stint with Windows XP that Windows Media Player did something like hiding the chrome, but then making it reappear outside (not overlapping) the content in the window. If so, Apple would probably avoid doing that just to avoid comparisons with Windows Media Player.
There are other choices on the Mac, of course. Not just QuickTime 7, but VLC. QuickTime X’s UI is unique, as far as I know, and Apple might be happy to let the other players do other things better, but they want to provide the best playback experience.
I just happen to prefer the older way, which is why I went to the Finder, selected a .mov, and told it to “Change All” to open with QuickTime 7 instead of X.