20-Second Simplicity

Quicktime, Apple’s prevalent media technology, is seeing its latest incarnation within a den of Snow Leopards, announced this last Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009. As with almost every updated release of the Quicktime,�a new icon emerges — in this case it is also accompanied by the addition of an X at the end of the name, probably acknowledging that it will be some time before the blue Q is completely superseded by the new one. In a way, this iteration of the Q-clock is the one that was always meant to be. Finally the count will reach 20 seconds and the arm will tick its way into formal harmony with the Q descender. I’m sure many of us have always wondered why this hadn’t happened at the outset. One can imagine that this current design m