In OS X 10.4 Tiger, when you brought up the ‘Get Info‘ dialog box when a file was selected, it gave the option to preview the file. If the file happened to be an audio or video file, a seek-bar showed up with the controls to play or pause the preview – but it also allowed you to arbitrarily select any point in the file and continue the preview from there. This seems like a great feature (it was) and it really allowed you to quickly get a grasp on the entire contents of a 10-minute song in just a few seconds by allowing you to jump to the location within the file that you were listening for.

Then, between OS X 10.4 Tiger and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, something changed. (I’ll admit, I skipped 10.5 Leopard, so this change may have happened in Leopard and not Snow Leopard). Now, in Snow Leopard the seek-bar from Tiger has been replaced by what I’ll call a round preview ‘clock button‘ for lack of a better term. You press the circular ‘play‘ button and it displays the progress through the file as a circular ring that wraps around the button.

Wow, still a great visual indicator of the progress through the file, arguably more visually appealing, and arguably more space-saving – how can’t this possibly be anything but a step forward for one of the tech industries most famous innovators? Well, here’s where I have a bone to pick; when they switched from the quicktime seek-bar to the ‘clock button‘ style, they forgot to add in the functionality that would let you arbitrarily seek through the file. Now you can only listen to it from the beginning, or stop the preview. Hardly as intuitive as the solution they already had, and quite a step backward, forcing me to launch a media-playing program to skim through a folder full of files to find the correct one to…open in a media-playing program to enjoy it.

Please Apple, cut out the rotten bits and let us enjoy the rest of what you have to offer. I could understand if this was your first attempt at a preview dialog, but to remove already-existing functionality and fail to present any newer functionality just seems like a big mistake to me. So tell me, how does this Apple taste to you?

—Tom

random |ˈrændəm|
adjective
made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision : a random sample of 100 households.

So ‘random‘ means a selection from within a range of perfectly equal possibilities. That sounds about right doesn’t it, well lets consider the definition of ‘arbitrary‘ now for a moment:

arbitrary |ˈɑrbəˌtrɛri|
adjective
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system : his mealtimes were entirely arbitrary.

Wow, now that sheds some more light onto how I’m feeling. Randomness is a part of arbitrariness, but it includes the whimsical aspect of human choice, not the mechanical aspect of randomness which is much more mathematical and based on probability. It still sounds pretty silly, so lets give an example:

“This blog post was very random.  I loved it.”

Well, was it a random selection from any number of existing or potential blog posts that could have been posted, or is it more likely that is was an arbitrary post, chosen with little regard to the consequences or impact it would have from any number of potential posts that could have been written. Think about it.

–Tom