Leopard Release Takes Cues From Online Video
These controls, in and of themselves, aren’t so dramatic. But the mimicking of online video playback really reveals itself in the integration of media at the operating system’s search and folder browsing level.
The Mac has traditionally had three views of the files in a folder: Icons (thumbnails in XP), List (details in XP), Columns (a quasi-Explorer equivalent in XP). The release of Leopard adds a fourth way to view, one that is familiar to anyone using recent versions of iTunes. Called Cover Flow, this viewing of files in a folder acts just like the album cover art viewing in iTunes, allowing the user to flip through various files, most of which (such as PDFs or Word documents or images or movies) show either the actual data in the icon or, in the case of a movie, the representative frame. Moving the cursor over a PDF lets you flip through the pages of the PDF without opening it. Moving over a movie reveals a play button in a circle, just like YouTube, GodTube, Jetpac or a variety of other websites with online video.
Not content to stop there, Apple also mimics the way controls appear and disappear on any video file in its QuickLook option (another way to look at details in a video, image, PDF, etc. that is slightly faster than opening the content in its original application). Yes, you heard that right: QuickLook is Preview the way Preview should have been in OS X Tiger, but now with media capabilities.
While the Play button appears over the video initially in Cover Flow or Columns, right clicking (or control-clicking for those using a standard single-button Apple mouse) reveals QuickLook and a fuller set of controls can at the bottom of the video file.
As is also the case in the DVD playback, another useful feature also appears with the controls: a subtle timeline with a slider point that can be dragged up and down the length of the video to rapidly skip from one area to another. I found this came in handy for skipping damaged areas of the disc that used to crash the DVD player in OS X Tiger.
An article in the October/November issue of Streaming Media magazine asked "Whatever Happened to QuickTime?" and then laid out the fact that Apple had driven it deep into the infrastructure of almost every product and piece of software the company makes. With Leopard, which started shipping this evening, QuickTime’s integration goes even deeper, to the core of an operating system that takes the best from the world of online video and packages it in a way that’s understandable, efficient and almost fun to work with.